Inge Scholl, 8 May, 1950
The view behind the foreground. The political history of the Ulm School of Design (1953-1968)«. Stuttgart 2002.

Photo: Hannes Rosenberg: Inge Scholl bei der Arbeit für die Ulmer Volkshochschule. November 1949., originally uploaded by ReneSpitz

The article introduces our framework for Social Data Visualization, and gives a good intro to the idea of object centered social systems. Let us know what you think!

This is the start of our communication strategy around the Loupe project – there’ll be some articles that dig deeper into social visualization and some visualizations of the impact this kind of interaction will have on the day-to-day life of financial knowledge workers.

SocialVizPatterns introduces a framework of interaction design patterns to support collaborative data visualization in social web environments. It takes an object-centered approach to the network (as opposed to an ego centered one) and discusses the following interaction design patterns:

Mapping – help people to choose the most appropriate way to visualize a dataset

Decoration – help people to attach visual meaning and identity to a visualization so that it can exist within an object centered social space and its meaning can be quickly transferred to others

Tweakability – give people a way of shifting and reformatting a data visualization so that they can make sense of the whole data set by understanding how it responds to dynamic changes

Annotation – help people to comment on, or draw attention to specific elements of a visualization without compromising legibility of that visualization

Snapshot – help people to be able to store ‘snapshots’ of the visualization in order to communicate their understanding of a specific visualization configuration

so, have a look : we’d love to know what you think!

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

via flowingdata

Here’s a few reasons why I’m heading over to Vancouver in February for Interaction’09

The speakers. OMG, the speakers…

I’ve been lucky to be engaged with the planning of this conference, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the presentations. A program with people like John Thackara, Genevieve Bell, Dan Saffer, Fiona Raby, Marc Rettig and Kim Goodwin (and that’s just the keynotes) is going to definitely expand my brain in ways I can’t even begin to imagine.

the tribe & the vibe

I went to interaction’08 earlier this year and was just blown away by, as Alan Cooper said, “all these interaction designers in one room”.

I, like many others, really felt like I’d found my tribe.  So I’m really looking forward to catching up with peeps I met earlier this year, reigninting friendships, meeting new people, and needing no excuse to talk about interaction design. The IxDA is such a fantastic group of practitioners, educators & students that it really feels like I’m at home when I’m hanging out at these conferences. That makes a big difference for someone who has to travel halfway round the world to get there..

the workshops

This is something I missed out on last year, and really wished I hadn’t. The list of available workshops this year is awesome! The main issue for me is working out which ones to do..? I think Steve Portigal’s Workshop: Well, we did all this research … now what? sounds great, and really helpful given the projects I’m going to be doing this next year. Dan Saffer and Bill DeRouchey’s Designing for Touchscreens and Interactive Gestures is definitely on my to do list.. Particularly since the launch of Dan’s new book on the subject

look after the jump for some more info about Interaction’09

From the IxDA announcement:

The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) is pleased to announce Interaction|09, to be held February 5-8, 2009 in conjunction with Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts + Technology, and the Faculty of Business, located in lovely Vancouver, B.C.

Mark your calendars now for what promises to be another exciting and informative conference centered around the design of interactive systems of all types, from web and desktop applications, to mobile devices, consumer electronics, digitally-enhanced environments, and more. This will be our growing community’s second annual opportunity to gather with several hundred other Interaction Design professionals from around the world.

Building on the successful format of Interaction 08 at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Interaction 09 will span four days, with two and a half main conference days preceded by 1 ½ days of pre- conference workshops and activities. Thursday will be devoted to a diverse and valuable series of professional workshops. Friday will be a busy and exciting day, with tours, additional workshops and opportunities to explore SFU, its surrounding community and Vancouver, along with leadership and organizing activities in the morning. The conference will open Friday afternoon, with a welcoming reception that evening.

Saturday and Sunday will be packed with inspirational and tactical sessions geared at anyone who practices Interaction Design. We look forward to Interaction’09 continuing to build on the quality of experience and community camaraderie we shared this year in Savannah.

I was reading this on the way into work today (iPhone, Google Reader, coffee in one hand, one eye scanning for trams across swanston st) and while I think this is a fantastic take on the state our digital shadow is in, I couldn’t get past the word ‘product’ and the commercial connotations it had.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that commerce and human rights are mutually exclusive.. what I’m thinking here is that commerce might be too small a field for this very cool document to situate itself.

.. and while I know that ‘product’ is used in this context to describe the product of design endeavor, I do wonder if there’s not a better way of describing these things we make… particularly given the product/service dialectic, and the co-option of words by sectors (like commerce ‘owning’ product) that we really don’t have control over..

anyone got any thoughts on that?

I’ve realised that much of this thinking is piecemeal and not really coherent, but I think that Ranulph’s comments in my recent proposal review were not just in reference to cybernetics, but also other disciplines and their contribution to IxD.

So, it’s great when you hear architects discuss their interaction ideas (albeit second hand). Like Dan Hill’s reporting of Timothy Hill’s intentions for the State Library of Queensland:

Discussions with Timothy Hill indicated how the design of furniture across the Infozone was intended to, in his words, “break up the traditional anthropomorphic relationship between the user and their laptop”, based on observations of how intimately people actually relate themselves to their laptops. Hill had noted how people rest the laptop on their knees, lie down with it, use it in bed, curl up around it on the sofa, and so on. So the fixtures and fittings in the Infozone were intended to suggest this intimacy – in common with the ‘domestic’ touches in the design of the Library in general – and provide a wide variety of options as to how to use a laptop in the space.

On the one hand, a part of me finds this a great and direct link to interaction design, and the architectural situation, I’m also left wondering why these links are so apparent at this human scale. Why does the design of a seating area seem more ixd’ish than the design of a sporting stadium? of a Library for that matter?

Check out the original story; the bit above is just a small aspect of it that misses out altogether the way Dan is designing ways to communicate the urban industry of a post industrial workhouse.

Back in Feb the IxDA put on Interaction08 in Savannah.
Here’s a roundup of some of the press we had:

Core77 Liveblogged the event
Interaction ‘08…and we’re here
Interaction ‘08 : Jared Spool : What Makes Design Seem Intuitive?
Interaction ‘08 : Bill DeRouchey : Conversations with Everyday Objects
Interaction ‘08 : Gabriel White : Ethics of Everyday Design
Interaction ‘08 : Bill Buxton : Keynote
Interaction ‘08 : Michele Tepper : Design Across Disciplines
Interaction ‘08 : Chris Bernard : Classic Design Movements and IxD
Interaction ‘08 : Coroflot Job Board
Interaction ‘08 : Parties, Pictures, People
Interaction ‘08 : Signing off…

more to come in a bit..