MediaLab Prado Visualizar Humanflow
Im currently in Madrid for a fantastic two week production workshop and symposium “Visualizar“, with Ben Fry and Adrian Holovaty, organised by Medialab Prado. The days start at 10am and end at 9pm. I’m very excited to be collaborating on the humanflow project by Luis Miguel Cabanzo. alongside Nathan Yao, and Monica Sanchez.
Here are some of the other interesting projects which will be in intensive production over the next two weeks.
The Humanflows project is about designing purposeful, playful interactive visualisations which offer thought provoking views of historic and current data on “Human migration flows, its causes and repercussions”. My personal interest stems from the fact that its a purposeful visualisation, with the potential to educate an audience in an engaging memorable manner. Im interested in designing and prototyping the visual notation system and thinking about the types of interaction which can be quite meaningful in this context
Ill be updating this post daily after the jump.
Day 1 - Arrived at 6.30 after an hour of trying to find the Medialab situated in Alameda. I walked past it at least 5 times, without realising its a great big contemporary honking building, I asked 6 people if they knew where it was. “habla oosted ingles?” and “Como esta” are my friends! Madrid has a warm welcoming feel to it, and the people are very nice.
So finally after finding the Medialab I went in an met Miguel and Monica who had already spent half the day, Miguel the project initiator is a graphic designer and MA student and Monica is a Graphic designer based in Madrid. We were later joined by Nathan from UCLA who’s area of speciality is statistics and is currently completing his PhD. The idea of today was to achieve some degree of parity about what the project is and what it isnt and what its trying to achieve. Seems we’re all on the same track. As much as I love everything Miguel showed me in his sketchbooks and keynote presentations, Im going to suggest a slight diversion before things begin to solidify further. Im going to guage how he feels about going down a grungier visualisation route.. how about oculart meets Tufte?
At the moment everything I saw was beautiful, clear, minimal and typically what youd expect. Anyway to be honest its a pretty superficial point, and currently it has little to do with the broader remit of this project and the toolbox like interaction which is possible.
Day 2 - Ordered breakfast by pointing. How delicious it was too. The Spanish concept of starting at a particular time is apparently quite relaxed so 10 was 10.40. I dont mind it at all and answered emails and practiced my Spanish. As others arrived, the day started off with a good long search for sources articles with the purpose of highlighting ideas which related to the area of immigration in its various guises we discussed many things including illegal immigration, Deaths on Borders, low birth rates vs anomalies in population growth (which we endearing called Alien Babies), .. I suggested the agenda should be to find areas of human interest which the audience of the visualisation could relate to before they even saw the visualisation and got to play with it, where the data itself or the point being conveyed didnt require images and would stand well on its own, naturally the Freakonomics book and the NYtimes Freakonomics blog were quite interesting and prompted us to extend our look towards finding unusual statistical data. I found an interesting study on the Effects of Education on the attitudes of host residents who receive immigrants and their immigration preferences. This study was across Europe and revealed the obvious, that more educated respondents are significantly less racist and value the cultural diversity, as well as believing that ultimately immigration generates benefits for the host economy (there was a sunday times article as well about how ‘migrants ease inflation pressure’, according to Phillippe Legrain who argues a case for open immigration, mentions how remittances (money being sent to the origin country) are usually spent not on arms or siphoned into a swiss bank account but they go straight to the local people, to pay for food, clean water, medicine, and fund small businesses.
I stumbled across the UNstats database while we were all looking for data, within minutes we asked and were provided with a printer, we printed all the statistic topics and highlighted which ones we thought were interesting in relation to our key themes (post-its) we are now in the process of downloading the data and Nathan is going to analyse it. we will draw everything to a conclusion tonight by discussing links between the data and tomorrow we are going to look at it in a segmented fashion, what does the data show, how can we show it.
Day 3 - Data Cleanup. maybe our data isnt so comprehensive after all, maybe we too lost track of what we were doing half way through the day, we had a bit of a review like state with the organisers checking on progress half way through the day which provided the much needed focus. Ben gave us the following pointers. - what are you trying to say. - what is the interaction adding, then how is it different. Jose Luis mentioned and emphasised the story telling aspect..
this is how people are leaving, why are they leaving?
All stuff we’d originally said and discussed basically, but like many others who fall down the visualisation rabbot hole and start constructing insane systems to do small things, we got sidetracked by the sheer glut of data, which we incidentally need much more of.. so Miguel supplemented it with much needed emigration data,… (people leaving a country) as opposed to immigration data which we had in oodles.
Ricard Marxer Pinon of Caligraft fame was also at this mini review. and he suggested we should find the smallest elements, code and play with them as a way of discovery.
Day 4 - Prototype Dev. with the first stage of definition behind us, we narrowed down today to get some initial elements working, nathan and miguel independently got the data out of the database and talking to processing. and I set about working on part of the visualiser component, based on what I was drawing yesterday in AS, essentially to emulate the non clean aesthetic and be dynamically generated. (theyre some way off from the drawings still and need much tweaking..) I basically followed ricards advice and broke it all down to its most discrete component the line! The second half of the day, Nathan and I went to the museum Renia Sofia, seeing the Guernica gave me some thoughts. then we just walked and walked, and walked.
Day 5 - Ben Fry’s last day here and also our presentation day. This is where we presented our project up to this stage and saw what everyone else was up to. In the morning Nathan showed us what hed been working on yesterday, it was essentially a semi finished prototype which we later presented along some visuals and directions. The main critique was that we werent focusing on the flow aspect. I think it reflected three things, 1. Insufficient data on specific flows 2. being somewhat sidetracked with data vis and the collection cleanup aspect 3. our determination to stay away from the over used map! Julian suggested that maybe we should go back to the map.
Day 6 - more visual style development but with a specific focus to show flows within a map. I got all excited about reducing the map to pixel dimensions and did a couple of experiments static and dynamic, Miguel also came up with what we’d been discussing the night before. Namely showing flows and seperating the text from the map.
Day 7 - I had a bit of a lousy day. changing accomodation. I felt a bit useless. cant be productive all the time I guess. not in the mood for programming much, but Nathan taught me some high school vector related equations, Slopes and Vector intercept [complicated] [easy] which I learnt quite quickly. -Alison augmented my knowlege by showing me lerp . Anyhow, by the time I’d coded something vaguely and remotely interesting, Nathan had already finished coding and integrating. Miguel and Monica worked on the map. and we have a list of countries with full data sets we want to use. Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, UK, US.
Day 8 - Candy! SVG library.. so more programming today with Ricards help I targetted a specific country by ID. which was pretty sweet, but then I managed to get all the id’s out into an array and target everything. still not that useful in the context of other stuff going on, but its a good learning experience for me.
Day 9 - Delete means delete.. not close tab. but anyhow despite the loss. I recoded what I did yesterday quite quickly which was good. Today we had Adrian Holovaty’s talk which was absolutely ace. As well as talks by Alberto Cairo and Staffan Landin (Gapminder Foundation) Communication Applied Data Visualization Seminar
Day 10 - Day 11
Some more weekend development work. actually I spent a whole day in the laundry room, I didnt fancy taking dirty clothes back home. Started thinking about kiosk design. Wandered around madrid for a bit. Nathan Visited the Prado, and we ran into each other while I was in starbucks.
Day 12 - Day 13
Complete finalisation of work. Flow optimisation. Serious consideration about which flows to display. Completed the Kiosk design. Corrections.Tending to presentation matters.
Day 14
Kiosk Deployement and presentation.
I couldnt be there for a presentation as I had an early flight home, but I hear it went down very well 