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!