Class Notes

Notes November 3 2006

Pentagram Design, found 40 years ago. It is a collective of designer, no manager all designers. IT is a social structure in early seventies. Different cities like berlin, longon new york, austion SF. Big corporate works like BAM, citi, Cutting text effects. More into typography stuff. Some exhibition work too. Characters like chairs. Background architecture and MEdia Lab, her first visualization project looks like architecture piece. Create something sculptural. Raymond … quotes about architecture. I started working paralel planes based on architecture software. Most of her works are structured around 3D architectual stuff. It’s a dialogue back and forth but the form suggests new ways of approach to the data. Actually it is great because it gives the viewer to explore the piece like a building. 1994. visible language workshop. -media lab. Thesis work called ‘embodying virtual space to enhance the understanding of information.’ Metaphors we live by. IT is a book that gives you the feeling you should trust your instincts.

Her thesis work is mostly digging metaphors and how they affect the society we are living, to every decision we make. Her joint thesis work ‘The Millenium Project’ is again digging 3d representation of the temporal information of artifacts from yesterday to today. Finding different relationships within the information, flying in the information. Everything that is tagged under the same name, we are exploring them chronogically. I like the effect of time, and interesting relationship of the layerness of the piece. It is all done in C and OpenGL. She looked at matrix to quantify the qualitative things. This work is for Quokka which they called immersive sports.
Her work with 1999 Wrap up, showing 52 laps of the racewith different colors and different standing along those laps. It is nice. Another one is showing race with crappy 3d sketchup.
Information art project called snatches. Penn Station Media Wall. Through your career you begin to not build things with hands on, instead, you begin to direct people and approach it as an director. She was interested those info lines, I like the pixel approach to the data as well. Typography is really important with different scales.
Just look at different examples of different visualizations with big typefaces. Typography is really part of it, which is another point that will make people engage with the piece an d make them use it the next time since they are getting something that makes sense for their daily lives. So the piece should be aesteticly engaging. Differen display types. It doesn’t have to a piece with flash screen, you can divide up the screens, more importanly you can think about the displays as parts of the visualization too.
Pretty visualizations really make so much different. Show data as it is enough to show. No data flooding, it is a good idea to bring couple of different designs. It doesn’t have to working, but it would be good to show the different positions in time.