VizWorld.com

Using data taken from the popular Nike+ sensor, students under the guidance of Nicholas Felton tried to parse it out and find some interesting stuff.  What they found was not just interesting patterns, but odd (and often hilarious) bad data showing runners vanishing, teleporting, and traveling through time.

These, of course, are glitches in the technology. As Shaw explains, interference probably knocked the altitude meter off base and the disappearing runners didn’t actually disappear, their Nike+ sensors just ran out of batteries. “Presumably [these are] all problems that the data crunchers at Nike wrestle with,” Felton says. And, as Felton’s students learned, it’s the job of the designer to tell that story, in this case as a cautionary tale: If you think Nike+ is the ultimate measure of your workout, take it from the guy who time traveled, and think again.

While nobody made what could have been an awesome Tardis joke, I’m sure the students got a good crash-course in data cleaning.  Unfortunately the article doesn’t cover it very much.  Nonetheless, it’s some pretty visuals.

via Infographic Of The Day: Nicholas Felton’s Students Hack Nike+ Data |Co.Design.

Graphics felton, nike

Rhizome has a nice short interview up with infographic & data designer Nicholas Felton about how he came into the field and where he got the idea for his popular “Annual Report”.

I read Catch 22 while I was in Japan, and it kind of changed it for me, thinking about Japan’s WWII experience, and I was reading about Italian fear of war, and it became very visual for me – there were a lot of weird conversations that were hard to put together on the page. I made maps of that stuff, and eventually I was treating Catch 22 like it was real, and making artifacts from it. In the spirit of Catch 22 I made artifacts that weren’t in the book, but came out of that contradictory world. That’s when I felt like I was always going to be bound to the book; if you hadn’t read it then the things that I made were kind of disappointing. I think thats why I was looking for better sources. The next project I made was a postcard project, where my girlfriend and I at the time took our activities in New York and transposed that onto an imaginary road trip. So that was kind of a blend of this world and a fictional world, and that was probably my first trial with taking day to day experience and turning it into a design exercise.

via Rhizome | Storytelling: An Interview With Nicholas Felton.

Science felton, interview

Daytum, the information tracking startup founded by the famous info-designer Nicholas Felton, has been acquired by Facebook.

Daytum is at least the third New York-based company Facebook has acquired, and its founders will be moving west to join the Facebook product design team at its headquarters.

I wonder if this means we’ll see yet another redesign of the Facebook interface, embracing some of Felton’s famously minimalistic design.

via Facebook Acquires Daytum for Product Design Team | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD.

Graphics facebook, felton

Slate has a nice short (4 minute) interview with Nicholas Felton, creator of the annual Feltron report that always makes waves in infographics and visualization circles.

New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton tracks where he goes, what he eats, and a million other tiny details about his daily life. Then he packages the data in beautiful annual reports. The publications used to be aimed just at friends and family, but now you can see them too.

The interview gets into a few of the social details like how much time he spends tracking the data, and the various tools he uses to keep up with it.  Hint: He makes liberal use of an iPhone Calendar (shown above on his desktop).  He also uses the FitBit, which I’m really excited to see how that turns out in his 2010 Annual Report.

Science felton, interview, slate