Jan Willem Tulp’s blog

Yet another design for the GUI. Your feedback is more than welcome!

I am working on a software application for time-tracking / project management / data visualization and analysis (of your projects). I am going to build this application in Scala and Liftweb. I am switching between developing, working out ideas, GUI design, and everything else I like to be doing to get this application off the ground.

Currently I am working on a screen design for a dashboard (see below). It is just a work in progress, but since I am a proponent of iterative and evolutionary development, I’d like to present you this screen design of a dashboard. It is not finished yet, and should just give an impression of the direction I am going. There are some questions that are unanswered for now, like: should I create multiple dashboards, or just one you can filter? Anyway, here is the design:

Your feedback is more than welcome!

Today I read an article in an online ICT magazine that a Dutch hospital has chosen some web-based BI platform, of which I won’t mention its name, to measure performance. And even though I do support the hospital’s decision for a product that allows for visual performance analysis, I do regret however the fact the the visualizations that the platform offers are not always the most intuitive.

Currently I am reading the book “Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis” by Stephen Few, a guru on data visualization. This book is all about the fundamental principles and practices of quantitative data analysis. It explains why some data visualizations work better than others.

Looking at the visualizations the platform offers that the hospital has chosen, I believe there is some room for more intuitive visualizations. An example: the platform allows for 3D pie chart visualizations.

First of all, 3D is most of the times harder to comprehend than 2D, because the illusion of depth makes it harder to interpret the diagram (also, in 3D bar charts, the bars often hide bars that are in the background, so the may be hidden completely, causing you to overlook some potential vital information for your analysis).

Now for the pie chart, consider the following image, just randomly picked from the Internet:

The purpose of a pie chart is usually to compare data. Looking at this pie chart there are 2 things one can compare: angles and surfaces. But because of the shapes of the pieces of the pie, humans naturally have some difficulties evaluating the differences in size. You can see that the red area is probably a little bigger than the green area, but it is hard to determine how much exactly.

Most of the time when comparison is your purpose, consider using bar charts. Look at the image below (also picked randomly from the Internet), comparing bars is much easier. Especially if the bars are ordered by size, and not alphabetically by the name of their labels.

As for the hospital, I generally feel that the user interface of the product they’ve chosen is too busy, too distracting from the actual visualizations. I really hope that they are able to get the ‘aha’-moments they seek with this product.

At backspace.com a great introduction to Info Graphic Design is posted as PDF document. Click here to check it out!!

A few days ago New Scientist has published a great Info Graphic that illustrates the mass consumption of earth’s resources. Although the Info Graphic is great, its message is quite a scary one…

Click for a full size image…

Here is a great visualization of the financial crisis, by Jonathan Jarvis:



The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.


And for an overview of more visualizations of the financial crisis, see one of my favorite websites: Flowing Data

Now, breeding images sounds a little weird, but at the Glocal Project they have done just that.

Operating out of the Surrey Art Gallery’s Tech Lab, The Glocal Project is a collaborative, multifaceted artist-led project that examines the changing role of digital image making today. The digital revolution has included the global proliferation of millions of image-taking devices (such as digital cameras, video recorders, cell phones, and PDAs) and the sharing of billions of images through online networking and archival sites (such as Flickr). As this democratization of digital technologies makes the ability to make photographic images so ubiquitous, Glocal is interested in looking at the implications of the changing roles and relations of images within the field of visuality. Glocal is particularly interested in exploring the construction and relevance of the “unique” or “originary” image in relation to the multiple or “multitude”.

• How can an image retain its ‘unique’ nature as resistance against being subsumed into the multitude?
• How can we understand the nature of “uniqueness”?
• Does it remain a relevant concept for digital image making?

Through interactive installations as well as a series of on-line platforms, Glocal examines the new digital lives of images. One of these on-line platforms is the Glocal Image Breeder.

One of the most challenging questions has been: how can we make sense of such a large collection of images?

Obviously the first place to start is to catalogue as much information as we can about each image. Some of this information is easy to gather: place, date, place, tags, and other basic information is readily available through Flickr. We’ve also written some simple scripts to record luminosity and to put together a colour pallette for each image. Perhaps most interestingly, we’ve also integrated compositional analysis software, which looks at each image and assigns it a ’signature’. This signature can then be compared against others in the database to find similar images. This is a very useful tool, since it allows us to find relationships between images that may not have been obvious to human analysis.

A definate must-see (and must-try)!

One of the conferences I would love to attend is VizThink ‘09. VizThink is gathering visual thinkers from all corners of the world to create the first global community dedicated to the use of visualization in all forms of learning and communication. They organize conference in North America and Europe for community members to meet and to be inspired.

The conference should NOT be attended if:

• you think bullets are best (ironic that this is a bullet list!)
• you would rather listen to a PowerPoint lecture, than participate in the creation of a story
• you want to continue doing things the way they’ve always been done

If you want to be inspired by exceptional speakers, guru’s, industry leaders, scientists, or industry leaders from companies like Google, or Nancy Duarte from Duarte Design (who helped Al Gore with his Nobel Prize winning presentation), or Apple, or Colin Ware from the Data Visualization Lab, you MUST attend!

Just imagine yourself watching presentations about subjects like:

• Moving beyond bullet points…using storytelling for presentations
• Aligning individuals using visualization
• Visualization in 3D? When does it matter
• Facilitation using photographs
• Designing compelling and effective information graphics
• Virtual worlds: future or fad
• Creating a global visual language
• Using visuals for powerful presentations
• Storytelling through comics and graphic novels
• Visual techniques for analyzing data
• Visualization principles for software design
• Facilitation through live sketching
• Can there be a true language with grammar and structure that uses visuals?
• Visualization as a brainstorming tool
• Organizing your world with visuals

For me it’s just a little bit too expensive to attend for now, so I’m looking forward to the European Conference in 2009, I will attend! Wanna join me?

On the blog of Adrien Segal I found a very interesting way of visualizing the tide data in NOAA’s historic tide database.

The body of work titled “Tidal Datums” is the result of my senior thesis project. The collection consists of a variety of objects inspired by the formal language of data graphics, intended to be a representation of analytic information through the medium of furniture. My work process began by gathering data graphs from NOAA’s historic tide database followed by translating the empirical information into tangible materials. The forms modeled from the data not only reveal a dynamic pattern, they facilitate a new way of experiencing information by enabling a physical interaction of tidal patterns with the body.

I have a passion for the synergy between technology and art. And while browsing the Internet last week, I stumbled upon the website of Lee Byron, a Carnegie Mellon University student. This guy has made some very creative visualizations and graphics. In 2006 he was asking himself: “what have I been listening to on Last.fm?”. He chose visualization as a means to figure that out, and has recorded a short video of the data-mining process. He used Processing for his visualization. Enjoy this inspiring visualization!



Last.fm data mining from Lee Byron on Vimeo.