Interactivity : Final Project Prototype Development II

Technology

Computer Vision

Processing with Blob Detection Library

Webcam

“Secrets” portion

After Effects

Prototype II

Interactivity : Final Project Prototype Development

Draft A

Draft B

Interactivity: Final Project Precedents

Final Project List of Precedents

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Interactivity: Visualizing the Obits

As I began my search through the obits, I was trying to locate that bit of information contained in the average obituary that would connect strangers, not only between obituaries, but also between the obituary and the reader. Although occupations are identifiers in our lives, they are often vague and frequently changing. Families give meaning to a person’s life, however a stranger will not necessarily care since they don’t have a personal connection with that family. Other than hometown, I believe that schools act as the strongest connections between strangers. There is a shared space, tradition, and unique time of life. For these reasons, my design process focused in on education.

Using all of the newspapers around the country for one year or as far back in time as internet obituaries exist, I propose the idea for a visualization of the past (i.e. passed-away) alumni of American institutions of higher learning. Universities and colleges spend a great deal of time cultivating their alumni relationships for purposes of both prestige and endowment support, and on the other hand, alumna often use the universities for sports or arts entertainment as well as career and social networking. It is a connection of interest in both directions. Once I began thinking about this relationship, I went directly to the alumni section of my own University’s web site. One thing that caught my eye was the section highlighting Notable Alumna. In this section, the University put on show the famous and the accomplished. The information is organized both by year and by school whether it be Law or Commerce or Arts & Sciences. Often this information is stemming from a larger database of alumni information. The most interesting of statistics, however, maybe have a chance of making their way to a “best of” list featured on the school’s website, but rarely does a school show their population in a new fashion.

Another site that came to mind and began to inform my ideas about the display of information was TheyRule.net.
This site visualizes the connections between the leaders of major U.S. companies. As I was thinking about the organization of my own visualization, the methods of connections within TheyRule came to mind as well as the expanded information a user gets after clicking on one of the representations. Perhaps it was simply the fact that TheyRule is also organizing the lives of people that really resonated with me. As evidenced in the style frames of the alumni obituary site, I did draw from the tonal range of gray of TheyRule, as well.

Another visualization that spoke to me is used to illustrate thematic links that connect essays. I love the overlapping circles used in mapping the themes as well as the vibrant colors. This layout really drove me to expand on the way I was initially thinking about the visualization based on the aesthetic of TheyRule. It really helped me to remember what is very obvious… that there is a necessary level of importance to be placed on visual interest and color. Also, this opportunity to color adds an additional level of expression of the data.

This visualization I propose would begin (frame 1) with a page showing spheres of different sizes with lines encircling and lightly colored dots of varying sizes around them. These spheres represent Universities and Colleges while the lines represent distance away from the colleges and the colored dots represent past alumni. At the bottom of the page is a control for the age of interest. If the user is interested in deceased alumni from ages 50 to 70 then they can arrange the slider bar accordingly. Depending on the age selection, the spheres will grow or shrink depending on the total number of deceased alumni of that age who when to that school. One would expect the larger state schools would have a larger alumni pool, and so a larger past alumni pool with a larger sphere, but only the visualization would answer that for certain. Once a school is selected, the school sphere then descends to the bottom of the page (frame 2) where it then acts as a point on a distance map relating to the individual colored dots on the page which represent the individual deceased alumna. Each alumna is placed on the distance map depending on how far away the were last living in relation to the University. A state school might have more alumna in the immediate vicinity of the University vs. a smaller private school. In addition to placement on the map, other characteristicsc are represented through the color and size of the individual’s dot. The color of the dot relates to the school the alumna attended. Attending a University for an undergraduate degree is a much different thing than a Law degree, so it should be represented accordingly. The size of the dots grow according to a number of different reasons. They would grow if , for instance, the alumna had received a medical degree since departing the school, had children, or if the alumna had left money to the school (often seen as in lieu of flowers please donate to “x” in the Obituary). Going on to attain a higher degree increases the prestige of the University, so in honor of this, connections to the other institutions are drawn using lines when the mouse hovers over the individual’s dot along with the line to the main institution. Just as a higher degree brings prestige, having more children often “breeds” more alumni since children often go to the schools of their parents, so large families increase prominence in the visualization, as well. In addition to these connections a box appears with the name of the deceased and icons representing their different accomplishments as listed in the obituary. The name, also, provides a link back to their obituary. As giving back financially to the university is of great importance, a star is placed around those individual’s dots. Not only is this a sign of their generosity, but is often another way of their showing school support.

Although a rather morbid exercise in school spirit, it has the opportunity to be an interesting organization of data. Also, the potential is there to link information found solely from the obituaries and match it to already existing records from the universities themselves. So, I suppose my final thought would be that perhaps if a visualization like this existed alumni would be encouraged to donate to their University in their final wishes in an effort to attain just one last gold star.

Precedents:

1. The University of Virginia’s Notable Alumni Search
2. TheyRule.net: I continue to look back to this site as an influnence on representing the life of one person through simple icons. TheyRule.net represents power through the “weight” of the representations.
3. Visualizing Essays

 

Interactivity : What’s in an Obituary?

Our first speculative design project for Major Studio INTERACTIVITY is based on the information provided by the everyday obituary.  We could choose to focus on all obituaries or just on obituaries from a certain newspaper, city, or state.  The design should focus on visualizing the information to show something new.

Here is an initial list of data featured in the obituaries that can be mapped:

• name
• age
• current city of residence/death
• date of death
• date of birth
• city of birth
• mother’s name and if still alive
• father’s name and if still alive
•  high school
• university
• occupation
• siblings
• children
• grandchildren
• neices & nephews
• funeral details
• memorial funds

Interactivity : Whitney Artport Findings

Found under Algorithmic & Software is the Ecosystem project

• important step in game play that the environment and structure of the game feeds (in realtime) off of outside data (generated by the international currency markets and market indexes along with the weather report at JFK airport)
• much of the world “lives” off of these markets today as the global economy is growing more interconnected each day
• transforms the financial world into a 3D world of flocks of birds which makes into nature which reinforces the fact that the global economy is a living thing, as well.
• puts the volatility of the financial markets into a context that everyone can understand : life vs. death, weather patterns, nature
• interesting detail : patron was finance corporation that supplied all of their data for the project

Found under Artificial Intelligence is the ARTificial ART: lines.

• program that creates organic shapes from randomly generated numbers.
• I like the issue that this brings up: the idea of randomness in human form vs. randomness in digital form
• if drawn by hand would this art be considered accomplished? when you take the human element out does it cease to say anything?

Interactivity : Thoughts on Joseph Weizenbaum’s “On Tools”

This reading is an organized and methodical analysis of tools beginning with the need for man’s imagining of the tool through to the way our world changes from the introduction of these tools.  Here are some key points from the text:

• “Man can create little without first imagining that he can create it.” p.18
• “[Tools] symbolize the actions they enable.” p.18
• Inventions such as the six-shooter, ships, the printing press, and the cotton-picking machine changed the world as they became an extension of the human body, making it more power and enabling more control on its environment.  “[The tools] signify that man, the engineer, can transcend limitations imposed on him by the puniness of his body and of his senses.” p.20
• The introduction of the idea of time and the clock was the introduction of an autonomous machine based on the planetary system.  Man no longer looked to the sun to know when to rise or when to sleep, but rather looked to the clock face.  “This rejection of direct experience was to become one of the principal characteristics of modern science.” p.25
• Creating new tools can unalterably affect our world.  There is an element of risk involved in such a change.  “‘Every thinker,’ John Dewey wrote, ‘puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril so no one can predict what will emerge in its plasce.’ So too does everyone who invents a new tool or, what amounts to the same thing, finds a new use for an old one.” p.26
• Modern tools are changing our world at a much faster rate.  “Later tools, e.g., the telephone, the automobile, radio, impinged on a culture already enthralled by what economists call the pig principle: if something is good, more is better.  The hunger for more communication capacity and more speed, often stimulated by the new devices themselves, as well by new marketing techniques associated with them, enabled their rapid spread throughout society and society’s increasingly rapid transformation under their influence.” p.27
• It is beyond our imagination that the systems of a World War or the development of an Atomic Bomb could have happened without the computation abilities of a computer.  Weisenbaum believes that although we think that the industries of past decades would have imploded without the introduction of the computer that is not necessarily the case.  However, he does go on to say, “the belief in the indispensability of the computer is not entirely mistaken.  The computer becomes an indispensable component of any structure once it is so thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure.