InformationDynamics

The Complexcity project explores major cities around the world focussing on how their urban sprawls have evolved over time. Using the patterns formed by roads in each city, Korean born designer Lee Jang Sub creates complex graphic configurations, combining the idea of natural and man made systems. In the process he finds a concealed aesthetic within the convoluted pattern of urban networks. He started with his hometown Seoul, and has already completed Paris, Rome, and Moscow. The first image illustrates the intricate urban pattern of Moscow, while the second is representative of Paris.

He has also produced a range of wall decorations using the same idea for spanish company Granada Design.

These work-in-progress maps are part of a study produced in the spring of 2008 for economist Yann Moulier-Boutang, law professor at the French engineering school UTC. They represent the linked terms of vocabulary used on the Web to talk about the intellectual property rights in French. The datasets came from the search engine Exalead SA.

Each node is a term and each edge exists when two terms or expressions are co-cited on a sufficient number of web pages, over more than 120,000 pages. 1283 expressions and 4984 co-citing links have been selected, assuming a representative approach against an exhaustive one. The first image is a detail of the general map where semantic clusters are represented with different color-nodes. The second image is a test to display the imprint of two meta-clusters : the vocabulary of intellectual property rights (in red) versus the one of industrial property rights (in blue).

The Emergence Project is a software art installation exhibited at Hyde Park Art Center's digital facade gallery from October 11 until December 31, 2008. The piece investigates how complex patterns arise out of a series of simple interactions, without apparent direction or plan. Rising from the actual as-it's-happening discourse emanating out of the Chicago Humanities Festival, the presentations, performances, and panel discussions are captured, analyzed, and processed into visualizations that dynamically evolve from minute to minute. The generative artwork uses simple morphological rules to animate word clusters, based on linguistic proximity, similarity, and difference.

In the work, hundreds of organic digital creatures embody contributions from panelists and the audience, captured by natural language processing software and the World Wide Web. The digital creatures, or idea clusters, continuously interact with each other, evaluating qualitative proximity in regards to their meaning and frequency. Thousands of local interactions between the creatures, as well as autonomous creation of new creatures, eventually generate patterns, that represent 'big ideas' emerging from the discussions throughout the festival. The piece continues to evolve over time, reflecting the evolution process in form of graphical patterns, statistics and maps.

Emergence has become one of the liveliest areas of research in philosophy and science. Examples of apparent emergent phenomena range from colonies of ants to the popularity of a particular hairstyle, and life itself. The Emergence Project interrogates the very concept of Emergence by reflexively adopting emergent behavior simulations to contemporary discourse on Emergence.

With thousands of donors for McCain and Obama, the authors wanted to analyze the types of people donating by examining the top 250 job titles for each candidate and trying to determine how much influence they have on the overall donations viewed in their previous visualization.

Since the donation information must be disclosed to the public, they turned to the Federal Election Commission to find a data set containing all donors, the amount they donated as well as other information the authors may try to explore next (i.e. occupation, zip code, employer).

The first image represents all donations made to Obama, and the second to McCain. The job titles (on the left side of the arc), start from the most common (Retired for both) on the left to the least common (of the top 250 titles) on the right. The right side of the arc is segmented into dollar brackets. The left bracket are amounts less than $100, the second is $100 to $500, the third is $500 to $1000 and the last (the largest) is over $1000. Also, the size of the right side ($ amount) segments are sized according to the total percentage of donation amount from the donors listed.

The most obvious result is that the most common donors for both candidates donated in the top-most $ amount bracket. However, for McCain, the top-most doners dominated his higher dollar brackets while the lower two are very mixed. In Obama's chart, we see a more dominant role of the less common doners in the $100 > $500 bracket. Also, Obama's lower (< $100) bracket is larger than McCain's.

2007 was a record year in spam. Worldwide, more than 346 trillion spam emails were sent, which represent about 98% of all e-mail traffic. In an effort to understand who is behind the spam and why it's so difficult to effectively combat the phenomenon, Daniel Burger, as part of his thesis in FH Dusseldorf, produced a striking book (164 pages) with amazing information design posters depicting different aspects of one year's spam in 2007.

The annual report is based on the results of intensive searches and summarizes a variety of sources. From literature and the Internet, data, facts and information about spam and spammers were collected for this work. As spammers rarely voluntarily provide information on their illegal operations to disclose, Burger had to look at a variety of publications, organizations, government agencies, market researchers, scientists and software companies, in order to get the information he needed.

This simple, yet effective application built in ActionScript 3.0, works as a test environment for the SoundCloud API. SoundCloud is a great music sharing service, allowing artists, record labels & other music professionals to easily receive, send and distribute music.

RadioCloud allows the browsing of SoundCloud users, and respective connections, and the streaming of their most popular track.

This visualization by Ben Fry depicts all of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. Alaska and Hawaii were initially left out for simplicity's sake, but then Ben Fry felt guilty because of the sad emails he received. However, he made the final decision of leaving them out permanently because the two states didn't "work", since there aren't enough roads to outline their shape.

The first image depicts all 48 states while the second shows a detail view into Kansas City, where the white blocks seem to be rural routes and unnamed roads.

Developed for the Foresight Tackling Obesities project, this causal loop map was designed to provide systemic insight into the multiplicity of factors contributing to the obesity epidemic. Behind the simple result of people becoming heavier, lies a complex web of often reinforcing causal factors that range from individual psychology and physiology to the culture and economics of food production, food consumption, attitudes toward physical activity, and structure of the built environment.

The 108 variables shown on the map - the drivers of obesity - were compiled by shiftN, from the 38 science reviews produced for the project and then vetted by the project's science team. The drivers are woven into systemic picture by the positive and negative influence arrows that link the variables into a web of causal relationships.

Natures is a project that explores the dialogue between the natural and the artificial, creating a world where these two elements coexist harmoniously. It consists on a series of audio-visual compositions that simulates organic behaviors through an atypical use of motion tracking techniques.

The melodious movement of plants spinning with the wind triggers an intricate web of computer-generated lines and shapes. Interpreting the organic structures of the plants, the artificial element becomes part of the natural and vice versa.

Natures can be shown both as a single channel or a multi-channel piece.The multi-screens option consists in a large scale high definition video which is projected across 3 adjacent screens. The setup is flexible to be installed vertically or horizontally with 2 or 3 screens.

The interactive installation maeve (MACE-Everyville) provides visual and tangible access to the social and intellectual networks behind architectural projects. The installation is part of the 11th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. It is on display from September 14th to November 23rd. The project is designed and developed by the Interface Design team of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. At the Biennale, maeve connects the entries of the Everyville student competition and puts them into the larger context of MACE content and metadata. By placing physical project cards on an interactive surface, users can explore the presented projects, embedded in an organic network of associated projects, people and media.

The installation consists of an interactive surface and a large projection area. While users are interacting with the contents of the installation on the interactive surface, the network and the media files are displayed on the large projection. The ten winning projects from the Everyville student competition are represented as physical cards. If a card is placed on the interactive surface, a contextual space is opened around the project. Within this space, media files, related projects and keywords are visualized. When a second card is placed on the surface, the space turns into a network displaying similarities between the projects. In addition to the Everyville cards, the installation also contains inspirational projects from the MACE repositories. These projects are also represented by project cards and enable the visitors to connect the Everyville projects to MACE contents. Furthermore, as the interaction with the cards is not limited to the one person, entire groups and teams can explore the content together.