Category: Uncategorized

Eyeo 2018 – Giorgia Lupi from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

Giorgia Lupi is an Italian, New York based information designer and entrepreneur who aspires to create compelling visual narratives that challenge the stereotype of impersonal data. Lupi studied architecture at FAF in Ferrara, Italy, before completing her PHD in design at Milan Politecnico. Her body of work is based on a sole kind of medium, rather, her work traverses the boundaries of digital, print and handcrafted representations, but rather, she uses whatever drawing medium is appropriate to best represent data. Something that I really admire about Lupi and her body of work is how she treats each data analytics case as a blank canvas, and creates a unique visual language for the dataset at hand. I also admire how she is able to visualise numbers in a way that is compelling by creating narratives, storylines, and humanising the data. Something that strikes me as very impressive is how data can be meaningful.

One project that I was really captivated was Dear Data, a project done in collaboration with Stefanie Posavec, a fellow information designer. The two were previously strangers, but were able to cultivate a friendship and tell a story about each other via weekly postcard ‘reportings’ regarding details of their daily lives. While I typically think that numbers and data are quite boring, the result of this project was a creative, engaging and intimate experience that documented the seemingly endless multifaceted aspects of two people’s lives.

Throughout Lupi’s talk, I really enjoyed her use of hand drawn screen transitions that speak to the body of her work, and how she dissects each case study of her project to discuss the brief, the collaborative efforts, process and physical products. Learning about the way in which data was interpreted and the integration of her visual voice into her presentation ultimately made for an effective presentation.

Flight Visualizations over 24 Periods, Institution: NATS (2014)

NATS is an air traffic control services provider and in this particular video, they visualized the air traffic coming and going to European airspace over the course of 24 hours on a summer day in 2014. Despite the fact that there is not much information available on it, I chose this work because after I graduated high school, my parents moved to Germany for 3 years. During those 3 years, I had the privilege of making many trips to, from, and within Europe. Throughout the countless delayed flights, time spent on the runway, and in the air, I became increasingly aware of the sheer number of flights that there are in a day and wondered how air traffic was managed and controlled.

It is particularly fascinating and meaningful to me to see this visualization. In terms of creating this visualization, I image that NATS has access to all of the flight routes of any given day and they carefully compiled these routes onto a 3D model of the Earth. I really like that they used a dark background for the Earth and used an eye-catching neon color while also making it slightly opaque — so that we can see places where many of the routes overlap.

(* Note: This assignment was submitting using one grace day.)

Project-07

// Joanne Lee
// Section C
// joannele@andrew.cmu.edu
// Project-07

var nPoints = 100;
var colorR = 167;
var colorG = 168;
var colorB = 212;
var div = 0;
var w = 0;
var h = 0;

function setup() {
  createCanvas(480,480);
}

function draw() {
  background (240);
  push();
  translate(0,0);
    for (var c = 0; c < 6; c ++) {
      h = c * 96; // shifts height of flower
      for (var d = 0; d < 7; d ++) {
        w = d * 80; // shift width of flower
        drawEpitrochoidCurve(colorR, colorG, colorB, div, w, h);
      }
    }
    if (mouseY > 0){
        div = (mouseY / 15.0) + 5; // flower size scales to mouseY position
    }
  pop();
}

function drawEpitrochoidCurve(colorR, colorG, colorB, div, w, h) {
    // Epicycloid:
    // http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Epicycloid.html    
  var x;
  var y;
    
  var a = 80.0;
  var b = a / 2.0;
    
  fill(colorR, colorG, colorB);
  beginShape();
  for (var i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
    var t = map(i, 0, nPoints, 0, TWO_PI);
    x = a * (6 * cos(t) - cos(6 * t)) / div + w;
    y = a * (6 * sin(t) - sin(6 * t)) / div + h;
    vertex(x, y);
  }
  endShape(CLOSE);
    
}

function mouseClicked() { // petal color changes upon mouseClick
  var colNum = int(random(1,4));
    if (colNum == 1) {
      colorR = 167;
      colorG = 168;
      colorB = 212;
    }
    else if (colNum == 2) {
      colorR = 207;
      colorG = 61;
      colorB = 160;
    }
    else if (colNum == 3) {
      colorR = 90;
      colorG = 76;
      colorB = 181;
    }
}

For this week’s project, I first thought of flower petals when I was looking at the possible curves. I looked up flower petals and liked the colors and shapes of these, so I used ranuncloid curves to create them. Ranuncloid curves are essentially epicycloids with 5 cusps. For interactivity, I thought it would be interesting to make the flower “grow” using the mouseY position as well as randomly alternate between the flower colors depicted above with mouse clicks. I purposely had the flowers overlap with each other at its largest size because I thought that it formed an interesting pattern.

Studio NAND’s website is like their work; it’s catchy and dynamic. One of their projects, Peak Spotting, took data gathered from Deutsche Bahn, a German railroad company, and created a tool that in real time displays data for all of their lines, and through use of historic data, projects estimations up to 100 days in the future for data like train use. I think that what they’ve made is both utilitarian and well-presented (you can really see that they care for style). It looks like they’ve developed their own industry-oriented app that displays all of the data that Deutsche Bahn records. In part, Deutsche Bahn is to thank for keeping such detailed records, but Studio Nand’s design team did a good job. The animation above is simple but colorful, and the bar charts are pleasant to look at without compromising the reality of the numbers. It’s nothing too abstract, and doesn’t aim to be art, but it’s just straight-up good data.