• Tableau Software
• Google
• 37 Signals
• MIT Media Lab
• Apple
• Media Lab Prado
• Stamen Design
• Duarte Design
• Human Computer Interaction Lab (University of Maryland)

Now what makes these organizations cool? I think they have the following in common:

• they have a very clear focus on certain products, services or projects
• they are trend-setters
• they value intuitive user experience
• they turn complexity into something that is easy to understand
• they create things that are pleasing for they eye
• beautiful design is a means to create emotionally appealing products
• they are creative and innovative
• they use sophisticated technology
• they create products that touch people or help people getting insight
• thought leaders and the best in the field work at these organizations

What organizations do you find inspirational and why?



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

Messa di Voce is a performance and installation in which the speech, shouts and songs produced by two vocalists are augmented in real-time by custom interactive visualization software. The visualization software used is Processing. Really a must see!! If you’re in NYC, you can watch the performance live and for free on February 23rd, so be sure to be on time!



Messa di Voce (Performance), Excerpts from Tmema on Vimeo.


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)!

The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.

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?

I absolutely believe in the power of storytelling. And after hearing Scott, I thought: why not take it a step further: collaborative storytelling! Would it be possible to create some sort of online community where people can collaborate on telling a single (endless?) story by contributing parts of the story. You can compare it with pieces of a puzzle, where everybody adds another piece. Also, Scott inspired me about parallel stories and circular stories, so I imagine that online story collaborators can also add join-points to the story in order to have multiple story lines, multiple endings and multiple beginnings. The story line itself should be visually represented so that users can easily navigate the story, and add their piece of the story. You might even reuse parts of the story, or rate each others story parts so that you can become the ultimate story collaboration champion of the world! (wouldn’t that be nice )

Pieces of the story could be a mixture of movies, written stories, pictures, sounds, or you could have stories for each media type: a video story, a text story, and so on. And perhaps, some automated process can generate random story lines on demand. Maybe collaborative storytelling is suitable for multiple contexts, for instance in education, just for fun online, or businesses perhaps.

What are your ideas about collaborative storytelling? Do you think it is possible? Would you consider it fun to contribute? Is it feasible? Do you know of any existing online story collaboration communities?

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.


My brother, Wouter Tulp is an illustrator. I recommended Blurb to him. Blurb is a company and a community that believes passionately in the joy of books – reading them, making them, sharing them, and selling them. After my hint, he immediately dropped everything he was doing, and started working on a book, filled with beautiful illustrations of his own. Just a few days ago his book was released, and available for the public to order.

Enjoy!