A project I admire: Planetary

I admire this project because it is beautiful, but also useful. I also like how Bloom used the star-planet-moon relationship to represent the artist-cd-track relationship, which isn’t quite the same, but makes sense when organized visually. I wasn’t able to try out the app myself, but the demo video indicates that there are natural motions and animations in place, which is also a plus.

A project that fell short: Letters-pairs analysis
I had high hopes for this project, since it analyses the frequencies of grouped pairs of letters in various languages, and I’m a huge language nerd. However, I feel that the project falls short visually, and left me disappointed.

When you go to the website, the first thing you see is a rapidly-updating set of data, forming a set of jostling circles that seem to be placed randomly. Once you locate the information about the project, you can begin to appreciate what’s happening a little more, but it’s still visually jarring to have such jerky, quick changes on the screen!

Additionally, the visualizations fall short in that it’s hard to compare them. There are examples of analyses in different languages, but because the visualization is so jumbled, it is hard to create comparisons.

A project that surprised me: Petting Zoo

In this project, I was surprised by the level of emotion and amount of time the people in the video seemed to invest in the simple robot tendrils hanging from the ceiling. The robot’s interactions are very limited, but it was clearly enough to elicit a response. Striving for this kind of simplicity could inform how I approach projects in this class.