The conference aimed to offer different approaches concerning statistics and information design and which are their role in our society as knowledge transfers. The bottom-up approach to politics is growing and “community” is an important key-word. Usual statistics “neutralizes” the person. The new mission is bringing back people to the centre of the data, it’s the “societistics age”.

The most important messages from the conference

As a general message, information must be given in the most clear and organized way. It is also increasing the data free access in which bottom-up analysis are raising and generating important messages to the society.

Data and information are presented in deeper analysis than only numerical references. Immersion into subjects matters and making data more familiar is crucial. “Sense making” is a guideline. Another challenge is making the society more concerned and engaged about statistical numbers. Designing persuasive information so people can realize the necessity of changing their behaviours. “Change making” is a new strategy to concrete future state. Information design should also help predicting future scenarios and not only inform about present and past facts (good references http://www.humantific.com/ and www.amanda.com).

Change making and persuasive information specially concern about public decision-making. One strategic information to promote conscious and behaviour’s changing is simply given people a sort of feedback from their social lives’ impacts. Once they become aware about the consequences of their acts, they try to change it without affecting their lifestyles (http://www.dur.ac.uk/smart.centre/).

Several speakers pointed out “story telling” and “rhetoric” as key-words. Information tells stories. What kind of message would be more efficient to the audience? How this message should be given? Story telling and rhetoric are present in animated graphics and static ones as well. They are also very relevant for advocacy and campaigning information. Some great references about the use of story telling are the visual maps from Regina Rowland (http://www.ccsf.edu/Resources/Faculty/rrowland/ ), Tactical Technology Collective (http://www.tacticaltech.org/) ,

Aesthetics relevance of the data designed also matters: if there is no legend, is it possible to understand what is the information about?

About user experiences

Knowing well the target’s profile is very relevant to the data design. In the case of visual information, the visual background of users matters: young males tend to prefer more interactive interfaces. Older people and women tend to prefer a “boring” interface (but clear, of course) specially if they don’t have time enough to interact with the interface. They find out that the information they were searching for is more “imediate” and easy to find. Elderly people have a very different visual culture and experience difficulties when the interface is too dynamic (see the research by Patricia Wright).
About the interactivity’s use, knowing the real relevance of interactive information in a specific context is important. Does it help to facilitate its access? User experience design has also to do with the sense of clarity and must considers the user satisfaction: how much could the user understand from the information he had? Emotional aspects also matter: past experiences influence the way users will search, interpret and understand the data.

The challenge of user experience design is making people enjoy and pay attention to data. According to Nigel Holmes, information can also be “fun”. In his work, the comic aspect is used to make people relax and enjoy the information, helping its understanding (www.nigelholmes.com).

Some trends and key-words to point out:

• contextual statistics: the user who accesses the data, first has his own position in the statistical representation and then he compares it to the whole society;
• social indicators statistics: to facilitate public decision making;
• story telling: visual information comes together with a written explanation that helps its understanding;
• motivate discussion: it’s important offer space for the community discussion. Interaction and knowledge exchanging between people should be stimulated;
• user generated ranked statistics: share and create understandable information systems;
• data meaning;
• visual thinking;
• cross-cultural communication: ethnography research, visual maps and isotype can be a good tools;
• social media visualization is a strong trends;
• tools that encourage comparisons are more effective to improve understanding;
• new information aim to close the gap between qualitative and quantitative data;
• “living maps”: mapping popular emotions are new trends. A good example is the mapping of mobile activities in a city landscape (see http://www.urbanmobs.fr/en/);
• recommender systems (http://www.wolframalpha.com/).

Fields in which there are good opportunities to use information design:

Healthcare systems and public health organizations
Social indicators: “simon project” (www.gesis.org)
Geovisual analytics (http://ncva.itn.liu.se/)
“Well-being” (http://www.nationalaccountsofwellbeing.org/)
Ecological footprints
Energy consumption and impacts (watt’s time, by EDF R&D Design)
Cities maps as social indicators resource: http://www.cityrank.ch/ and the “Urban Dynamic Model”
Information design for advocacy and campaigning
Information design to create persuasive information to help public decision-making

A lot of interesting speeches have been listened to and we were there to speak about Complesity and the role of Information Visualization in moving the issue of complexity in opportunities.

Unfortunally Manuel Lima from VisualComplexity was not able to be there to tell his story about him, but it should be amazing having him next year

For us was amazing to meet Andrea Vaccari from MIT SeansableCity Lab that had very few minutes to speak about his work with digital-footprints visualizations.

Hope to re-meet him soon

Anyway, for the italian speaking of you, here you are the video of the short speech:

Slides are aslo available here:

Thanks;

What we have done yesterday during the ExperienceCamp 2009? Well, we discuss successul stories, learned lessons, innovative ideas and approaches. The aim was to stimulate reflections about the huge world of the user experience design.We have learned through different case histories and examples by these speakers: Daniele Cerra and the Playful UX, Gianadrea Giacoma and the De.Mo (Design Motivazionale), Leandro Agrò and the Internet of Things (the Spime projects), Valentino Spataro and Copyright laws (Civile.it), Luca Mascaro and UXD by passionate people, Luca Sartoni and a funny presentation about big mistakes in design, Sean Carlos and the CEO basic elements, Alessandro Galetto and his own experience within a big mobile company, Francesco Fullone and the Agile approach to design, Roberto Marsicano and his Brand project.
That’s all. A really intensive day as you can see!

Thanks to Sketchin, SocialMediaLab and Elastic for the organization.See you soon guys!

Manuela

The seminars I attended were quite interesting related to the way international and national statistic organizations are now (finally) adopting new web2.0 solutions; among them a lot of the tools we spoke several time in the past: ManyEyes, Gapimder and Swivel.

I also think that infovis and user experience design could now be ready to help national statistic organizations to deliver high-quality knowledge designing and developing services involving users into delivery and production processes.

As an infovis company, here at VISup, we do really belive that is now time to invest time on these amazing topics!

Stay tuned!

We’ll run it in order to offer a brief insight on what infovis is and how it could help companies (even small companies) and people to act and understand phenomenas.

The workshop will be held on November the 13th, so I would like to invite all of you to contribute submitting ideas, topics and suggestions.

Thanks,
daniele

Some monthes ago we worked together with Ogilvy Interactive on “weWired.it” project, where we had to focus on interaction design and information visualization issues.

The core concept was about how to represent the Buzz about the upcoming Italian version of the world famous Wired Magazine.

Very few weeks were available to be spent on the project, so we decided to figure out a quick solution to visualize the connections among:

• Time
• People
• Themes
• Social Media (such as: twitter, flickr, youtube and blogs)

The first issue has been related to get information from the internet; we worked hard to figure out how to get information from several sources related to the relevant themes and how to collect them in an appropriate way.

After solving the “data mining process” Ogilvy developed the aggregator engine and we worked on the information visualization issues: we got a lot of noded connected among each other, mainly by contents.

We decided to use a Node-Edge Graph representation in order to better understand the context where each item (author, post or picture) actually is.

Using such representation could also offer a quick insight about “hidden” relations among related items (more over among authors speaking about similiar themes).

Real-time filters (such as time range and/or social media) could also help to better undersaìtand and discovery conversations, without losing focus on selected item.

In terms of challenges we had to find a solution about how to display the maximum number of items in the fixed size of the screen, letting the user able to better select and view any of them. We figured it out adopting some algorithms to position each item next to another, avoiding overlapping.

In order to better use the available screen size, FullScreen feature from the FlashPlayer was adopted as a way to represent more detailed graph, with a deeper level of related edges to be represented.

We used flare in order to quick visualize the interactive graph.

During the morning we speak about wikinomics and how to understand users behavioural patterns and integrate them with crowdsorcing and social media rules.

We’ll try to give to students a bright overview about involved topics and, more over, we aim to discuss with them on specific emerging trends that could enable innovative ideas and/or solutions, both on business and/or on social sides.

Today we mainly focus on User Experience Design and Research activities to offer the right methodological tools to answer the most relevant questions when involved in understanding such complex scenarios, like the ones related to designing social services.

It’s possibile to have a look to the slideshow below:

Together to the slideshow I’ll use show videos in order to better explain some keyConcepts.

They are:

Information R/evolution, by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Antropology at Kansas State University

A Vision of Students Today

The world wide famous Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

More over we’ll show some videos about services and products such as:

LocoMatrix

OpenSpime

RoofRay

More over other slideshows are interesting and other resources are availbale to the students.

After lunch we’ll meet the students from the DensityDesign Lab, just to introduce opportunities for them to better be involved in our business and start sharing with them thoughts and ideas about how to improve the design of information visualization solutions to let users understand and move into complex systems.

During the latest years the project has become more and more popular, due the increasing quality of its contents.

It have been started in 2004 from Steve Coast and it represent an interesting option to the usage of online maps delivered from other international big players.

As you could know, here in VISup we are working on a brand new version of Closer Image Viewer and we did some tests using OpenStreetMap images.

It’s amazing discoverig the possibilities we’ll have integrating Closer as a viewer for the OpenStreetMap world

We are now able to handle thousands of POIs and we’ll continue to investigate further issues.

So keep you updated

1 - When, how and why have you decided to research on infovis ?
I started to work on infovis projects shortly after joining my research group at Purdue. For one of our projects, we had to investigate the potential of using mobile devices for delivering analytic information about our university stadium’s network activity during college football games in real-time. This got me working on the issues of information abstraction and representation in a resource-constrained environment. It is this project that initiated me into the field of information
visualization. Initially, I wasn’t a big infovis enthusiast. Over the years, however, I gained further interest when I realized that infovis concepts easily move from the research phase to application phase.
Moreover, infovis concepts are being used by a lot of people for practical applications because they really impact one’s understanding of information and help gain insight into otherwise visually disorganized data.

2 - Which is, to you, the most interesting project you have worked on and why ?
The current project I am working on is a very interesting as it involves not only just aspects of visualization, but also takes into account human factors. We are trying to gain insight into human cognitive representation of a problem and how do people perceive certain analytical processes. Our further goal is to see if this can be reproduced to build effective visualizations considering the display constraints of a mobile device.

3 - On what themes are you working now ?
We are continuing to work on the general theme of presenting information for analysis on mobile devices. However, we’ve shifted our domain from sports related visualization to others such as geo-spatial data. Since
geo-spatial data has an inherent visualization aspect to it and mobile devices have become popular for geo-located services, we are experimenting with various techniques to present geo-tagged data. And as mentioned earlier, we are looking at not just plain visualization, but human factors involving the analytical process of geospatial data. Our goal is to develop solutions that can match the principles of “congruence” and “apprehension”.

4 - If you should suggest an education programme to a studentinterested in InfoVis, which University Course do you suggest him/her ?
I think UMD (Ben Shneiderman), UBC (Tamara Munzner), GeorgiaTech and Stanford have some of the well-known Infovis groups and courses present out there. With the hiring of new faculty in the area of infovis, our University (Purdue) is also going to see an increase in infovis related curriculum in the near future.

5 - How do you think infovis researches will evolve in your country for next years ?
The current trend for infovis researches is going to move towards more of supporting analysis to discover unexpected patterns, correlations, etc. An interesting sub-area that is getting attention is the support of
collaborative tools for interaction and visualization. With the popularity of web-based applications (Google maps is a classic example) and desktop applications like Google Earth, geospatial and GIS based infovis has also seen a surge in popularity in the recent days. And, last but not least, with the introduction of high-end phones such as the iPhone, we should hope to see a rise in innovative infovis applications on mobile devices too.

The goal of the workshop is to better explore and understand infovis opportunities and to complete it creating a small prototype as an example of what means using infovis tool to create usefull insights.

The workshop is open to anyone who would like to attend and will focus on:
* Infovis history, theory, tools and patterns (just a brief introduction)
* Prefuse and Flare tools
* Many Eyes

Me and Marco will host the discussion and we want to invite all of you to propose ideas and themes.

The start is around 09.00 and the location is in our small studio in Milano (via Archimede, 45).

Thanks,

d.