Andres Duany’s urban planning transect: (From 10 diagrams that changed city planning)

Arguably this is getting out of the realm of art, but it’s still within data viz. I’ll get more playful with the next example, promise. But breaking up cities (and nature) into place types, so we can more expertly address each individual place type, seems very compelling. The drawing here also helps make his point clear: in T5 you’ve got yards behind buildings, in T6 you have straight up buildings, in T2 you have mostly nature with a few scattered houses. Categorizing is the realm of engineering and planning; how can this combine with creativity and playfulness? Are there other ways to categorize parts of a city? Is that even worth doing?

Portals of color, by 1010

The thing I like about these is their sense of mystery. I just started playing the outdoor augmented-reality-I-guess game Ingress, in which you go around and tag “portals” that are public art pieces. I like that it makes it feel like there’s something mysterious around the city. The only problem I have is that it doesn’t go far enough. There are few rare portals; it’s just portals all out in the open and you can grab points by tagging them. These murals point to a similar kind of mystery: there’s a layer under the buildings all around you that you can almost see. I feel like something like that is what I want to pull out in my final project more too.

Audio Landscape

Audio Landscape is an interesting music visualizer created with HTML5 Audio and WebGL that draws a literal 3D-rendered landscape based on the MP3 song that the user provides. A first-person flight simulator-like arial view is shown, and as the user flies overhead, he or she can see (depending on the landscape chosen) mountains, volcanoes, or iceberg-like objects being constructed in the distance and in sync with music. There are lots of music visualizers (I remember them being quite popular in the 90s) that I’m sure this was partly inspired from, but pairing music with a natural 3D landscape that dynamically takes shape with music is a novel combination that I find interesting. I tend to prefer having a scrubber to tell me where I am in an audio track that’s playing, but I think the creator intentionally left such a feature out in this project to provide some level of mystery or surprise as to what type of landscape will be created next.

Blooms: Strobe-Animated Sculptures

John Edmark, a lecturer in Stanford’s art department, created 3-D printed sculptures using the Fibonacci sequence. He then spun them quickly and synchronized their rotation speed with a rapid shutter speed (1/4000 sec) to create a very smooth stop-motion animation. The results are mind-blowingly mesmerizing, as the sculptures spin and bloom to life. I love the seamless, beautiful illusion of motion with these 3D prints and lighting tricks; they have a hypnotic effect that had me watching for minutes. The same effect can apparently be achieved by using a strobe light so that one flash occurs every time the sculpture turns at the golden angle: 137.5 degrees. According to Edmark, the sculptures are inspired by the golden spiral, which is found in nature — sunflowers, pine cones, as well as other forms; he discusses the math behind it in an Instructables post.

Sorry, the video is in Dutch. It was an installation at the 2013 Dutch Design Week exhibition. It “scanned” you when you stood inside of it and printed out all the information found about you on the internet. I think this is a really smart design to let people think about privacy. There can be made one major improvement is both the beauty and the ugly of the design.

What to improve is automation. Currently nothing in the complete sequence is automated. They let people “sign” something with their full name. This is scanned and sent to a group of people filling in a document and googleing as hell, which is sent back to the onsite location. This is a really smart solution if you do not have the technical knowhow but completely redundant if you know.

I think this concept is quite brilliant. It is a camera that searches pictures taken from the position you want to take that photograph. It is a “Hey, look do not take the photo of the Eiffeltower 100.000 other people have taken already” device.

What is less good is the execution and to some extent also the concept. I have the feeling they could have taken in far further. Offer alternatives, take the angle into account, be more rude. Next to this it is an enormous device that sits in a far too huge plastic box hold together with elastic bands. Holding the exact same electronics as in a smartphone. In short: they could have just created an app…