One phrase that gets thrown around alot in Scientific & information visualization circles is “viz porn”, meaning graphics that are beautiful to look at and full of pretty colors, but offer little to no value in gleaming insight from the information. Richard MacManus over at ReadWriteWeb has an article up asking if new projects like wikicity are useful, or just Info Porn?
The theory being that this will make cities run more efficiently. And we’re seeing proof of this to some degree already – for example electronic bus stop displays that tell you when the next bus is expected, based on GPS data. However, for the most part projects like WikiCity are still academic exercises. For the geeks amongst us, just another beautiful visualization of data to marvel at. When will these projects create meaningful change in cities?
