I‚Äôve said a few times that 2010 is the year of data visualisation ‚Äì ways in which ordinary information can be visualised in a way that is practical and informative at a glance. In the old days, we were limited to visualising only small amounts of information, due to the cost of the materials. Time is money, so only thing we’d pay for, the only thing we could practically use to track and visualise is a diary – a way in which we could visualise our time in blocks over a day, week, month, year.
Now, technology is allowing us to track and visualise almost anything. This is now leading to an explosion of data visualisation (or visualization if you’re American) tools, and now merging art with data.
David McCandless
Here are a few ways people have made data visualisation beautiful:
David McCandless is a guru in this area. He’s a London-based author, writer and designer who “loves pie, hates pie charts”.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
Information Aesthetics is designed and maintained by Andrew Vande Moere, a Senior Lecturer at the Design Lab at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning of the University of Sydney:
http://infosthetics.com
Here’s a collection of photos of the Boston Commons – and a colour wheel based on the distribution of particular colours. User generated art.
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2010/03/flickrs-season-wheel.html
Type in a word, and the word itself is created by using a variety of random book covers from Amazon.com
http://amaztype.tha.jp/US/Books/Title?q=MELBOURNE
Type in up to two words, and Flickr Time will display a clock made up of images based on photos that contain those words / tags
http://www.hottoast.org/convexstyle/flickrtime/
Turn any website into a graph – the simpler the graph, the better the website. A giid way of explaining to a client if their website has poor navigation
http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/
Turn your music listening into a chart
http://www.leebyron.com/what/lastfm/
A site that finds tweets based on particular words / terms (I hate, I love, I think) and displays them on the screen in realtime
http://twistori.com/
That’s So COOL‚ who knew?