Looking-Outwards-07-mdambruc-InformationVisualization

Pitch Interactive’s “Invisible City” 2010

Visual Graph of Complaints of 34,522 calls

http://pitchinteractive.com/work/Wired311.html

Pitch Interactive has created a visual representation of complaints when they were filed over the course of one week on the 311 phone line for New York City, totaling up to 34,522 calls. This piece was shown in Wired Magazine and created in 2010. The NYC311 number was created to offer information about school closings and construction, but the visual representation cites complaints of “chlorofluorocarbon recovery” and “rodents”. I admire this visual representation of data because I feel it perfectly represents the aggressive nature of many irked callers. The obnoxious colors and obtrusive waves depict an image of a city of complainers. I also admire Pitch’s use of literal clocks to create a timeline as opposed to writing numbers, since it is an abstract look on time as well as aesthetically pleasing. In the NYC311 office there is a digital LED light screen which tallies the number of calls they’ve received throughout the day. I suppose that throughout the week that they were recording to create this graph, they simply created categories of complaints. Pitch Interactive then probably took the number of these complaints and created proportional waves that represented the number of complaints in a certain time of the day.