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.

Starting to think about my final project. I’ll start where I always do, thinking about cities and maps and infrastructure.

All Streets, Ben Fry. It is what it says: just a map of all streets in the US.

I like it because it’s pretty, it looks well-executed, it’d make a nice wall map, and it shows us some things about the US: the west is more sparsely populated, cities are where the black spots are, you can zoom in to see more detail (e.g. around the SF area). But I am really kind of more frustrated with it, because it doesn’t show us anything we don’t already know. I guess this map might be useful to an immigrant or tourist, but still, wouldn’t they just look at a political map? I feel like (and maybe this is an unrealistically high standard) info vis projects should show us something we didn’t know before.

John Powers, well, all his work really. Maybe Fat Bastard 2010, if I have to pick one.

This looks like a generative form, and it’s got a lot of right angles, but it really looks like a city. Kind of Metropolis-esque. But it’s an out-of-control city, buildings just flying all over the place. I feel a little overwhelmed looking at this, the same way I do when I see a huge metropolis like Tokyo or Delhi. I’m also inspired by Pedro’s last project– looking at all the buildings in a more abstract way. I’d love to see a Fat Bastard Pittsburgh with all the buildings in Pittsburgh balled up like this (with one block being one building, instead of whatever it’s supposed to represent here), and then the same thing with New York or whatever else.

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…

Da Vinci Surgical System

This isnt an art project or installation, but rather a machine that has been created to aid in surgical environments. Users control the robotic arms through 3-axis control station, and are able to complete different tasks in a surgical setting. I had the opportunity last night to test out this system with blocks at the S.T.A.R. Center for my Medical Devices class. It was hard to understand the depth perception of the arms. I also received no feedback as to the location of the robot arms in respect to the camera or table the blocks were sitting upon. Without depth feedback and spacial feedback it was hard to maneuver the arms to prevent them from hitting obstacles at times, but utilizing the controls was very simple. Almost too easy that I wonder the responsiveness when performing a surgery. Future systems should better integrate feedback into the system, without it we are running blind and depending upon shadows to now where the arms are located.

Digital Health Feedback System

Powered By You from Proteus Digital Health on Vimeo.

An ingestible and patch created by Proteus Digital Health that detects heart rate, activity and sleep. The ingestible is powered by stomach fluid, and transmits data to the patch worn on the arm. The patch receives the physiological data and sends it to your mobile device. The ingestible is made up of ingredients found in food, all which can be ingested. There isnt much detail about the technical specs of this device, and other than the ingestible component and energy source of stomach fluid, detecting heart rate, activity and sleep is no different than what Fitbits, Jawbones and other fitness wearable devices already do. This device has alot of potential but it is limiting itself to a scope that is already heavily populated.