siggraph-2009I just got out of my first SIGGRAPH session, the “Information Aesthetics: Designing Interactions” talk.  On hand were people from three projects:

All three presentations went well, and I’ve written up a short recap, after the break.

The theme of the discussion was on presented data not only in a means suitable for analysis and review, but in a way that’s aesthetically pleasing.  The Synchronous objects group probably stands out as the most beautiful of all data visualizations, not only for the approach and results but because of the source data: human dance.

First up was the Eigenfactors group.  They’ve taken a massive collection of scientific journal articles and data, and created a network of the citations to generate a network map of how the journals are interrelated.  Different from other published approaches, they are not actually analyzing click-stream or usage data, but simply generating random tracks through the articles citations.  The result is a somewhat “statistical” analysis that shows which articles and journals are referenced more often than others, but not necessarily more frequently read by real eyeballs.

The resulting network maps are a bit of a nightmare, so his presentation focused heavily on the many design iterations involved in generating the current visualizations.  He used several hierarchical algorithms with “magnetic” needles so that a selected paper would show it’s influence on others.  The final result, however, was a use of edge-bundling algorithms with a radial map to create an impressive visualization that quite beautifully shows the relationships between the papers.

Next up was the Synchronous objects people.  They had no slides, instead simply using the website during their talk.  If you haven’t been to the website, I highly recommend it as I haven’t been since it was initially announced that they’ve quite obviously been adding alot of new information to it regularly.   They didn’t really cover much beyond what you can see on the website with some searching.

Lastly was a project I was unfamiliar with, the Dartmouth “Greenlite” project.  In an attempt to cut down their power usage ($1m a year, just in the dorms) they instrumented the various power meters and now operate a web portal (shown on kiosk’s in the dorms) that shows a happy little panda.  At least, the panda is happy until power utilization rises too high and the poor panda drowns in the icy arctic water.  It’s an interesting combination of traditional data monitoring and visualization (they have the usual line charts, bar graphs, etc) with some social behavior aspects to try and “guilt” people into conserving power.  They justify this by saying that 60% of their utilization is “behavior” based, meaning people can simply turn off the lights or their computers for a pretty significant impact.

After the talks there was time for questions and answers. A few of the more interesting questions:

  • Synchronous Objects: Why “Objects”, and not “Patterns” or “Structures”? Over the two years the project was in development, several names were tossed around.  The final name “objects” (for the 20 “objects” they extracted from the dance) is a play on several themes.  Dancers are typically afraid of being “objectified” of their bodies, and the name comes from a paper from William Forsythe himself.
  • The guys at Eigenfactor will be at the 20th anniversary conference in Europe (not sure of the name), using his algorithms and visualizations on the conference submissions.
  • Project Greenlite: The current system is pretty susceptible to gaming, as results go “live” in about 15seconds.  They’re working on this, and adding visualizations and data from water usage and various other things.

That’s all I can remember at the moment.  If anyone else was there, anything you’ld like to add?

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