Visually complex

Repost from Run on Toast

Last Tuesday I was lucky enough to see Manuel Lima speak at BBH thanks to Made by Many. Sadly I'd just had a massive lunch and was a bit sleepy (damn pasta). For those who don't know, Manuel Lima is an interaction designer, researcher and founder of [the brilliant] Visual Complexity (description stolen from his website). It was pretty useful though. A couple of nuggets:

I liked the idea that 'data is the currency of online services', a belief that I've held true, and which will make a nice quote for a slide someday. The highlights for me were the idea of finding practical applications for data visualisation, what it might look like in the future and also finding out about the sites Many Eyes and Swivel, which allow you to do fun things with your data.

Lima gave this example of using Flickr data (I think) to geotag where photos were taken in Barcelona and at what time over a certain period. This data was then mapped onto a geographical map of the city showing how traffic moved over a day - the most popular routes, paths taken. This sort of stuff could be invaluable to tourist boards. I also liked the example of creating emotional maps of cities by measuring heartrate (not quite sure how this would be done) - would this be invaluable to marketers.

The most exciting thing that Manuel Lima talked about was the frontiers of data visualisation. I didn't catch the names of the experiments but they involved domes and sounds representing nodes - sounds awesome. If anyone was there and got better notes on this stuff, please let me know - I'd really love to learn more.

Comments

[Sol Wei]

hi priyanka!
i was there as well (but my notes aren´t any better). have a look at mxm blog, they ve uploaded the recording of the session.

[Sol Wei]

Hi Priyanka,
I ve just found this little link
http://creativity-online.com/work/cat-2009-joann-kucheramorin/17301
(I couldnt finish watching the clip, my computer s going so slow! but im pretty it´s one of the experiments Manuel was talking about).
Enjoy!

[pristyles]

Wow, thanks so much for the link - that is amazing!!