kip/bot/blog

Nearly every product (or brand supporting it) lives in a category that a small, but influential, group of people wants to pursue with some extra zeal. For sports fans, fantasy sports allows a whole extra level of geeking out. For sports participants, it’s possible to geek out on equipment, training regimens, techniques, diet. For anything high price, of high consideration, or with moving parts, it’s possible to geek out.

SO prevalent is the nerdification of everything, that a more useful way of defining influencer might be: a person who geeks out in your product’s category.

GE has a new contest, inviting someone to fly out to the UK, visit one of GE’s jet engine facilities. It’s a free trip, a cool visit to see mind-blowing stuff (regardless of how you may feel about GE, especially if you went to college in the 1980s), and some exposure. To enter, you have to take some instagram pics that demonstrate the four global dimensions of GE’s work: moving (transportation), caring (health), powering (solar, wind, ocean, and yes, coal), and building (building). While these efforts are described as “turning innovative GE technology into instagram art”, they do lots of other things: 1) impress people with the complexity and magnitude of what GE does; 2) add cool factor to the work of engineers; 3) create what a client of mine used to call “party points” – data that people can drop as little conversation nuggets; and 4) focus outsiders on the innovation and invention happening at GE.

I had a chance to pitch GE once at a former agency. While I was one of those political activists in the 80′s who protested GE’s participation in Star Wars, I was so enamored of the transformative power of what they do (see their tidal power generators, for one example), that I was dying to get on the job. It was one of the few pitches that designers begged to be on the pitch. This is a different kind of cool and cultural appeal.

As a kid, I wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein (both of them, yes). I could barely tell you what Watergate was about, or where they followed the money to, but I read the book in my tent in the backyard at age 10 and was absorbed – by their investigative intensity, the puzzle-solving, the clever interview techniques, the big journalistic personalities. The movie got me into the book and I recently rented it. What great production design, and how interesting to see all the pre-chip technologies at play (and the use of which advances the story, one of the most amazing things about the movie is the drama they brought to interviews, phone calls, phone book searches). Anyway, some fun screenshots:

a photocopy of a typed phone list(!):

typewriters:

phones that were heavy enough to be murder weapons in other shows but, for this movie, where you screw off the voice piece to listen in instead of hitting mute:

UHF and VHF for close to 15 stations accessed with knobs that turn:

handwriting(!):

if it weren’t for the thumbtacks, and the fact that Robert Redford would never do requirements gathering, I might think this was a card sort:

before people just threw them out, there was a time when there were rooms full of phone books:

and, sadly, one last thing lost to that era: the bad-ass newspaperman who still thrills to a story, cares about the free press, and totally kicks ass:

Ben’s profile pic is of him, very coolly/very dramatically, kicking a cinder block’s ass:

For her profile pic, Ben’s wife, Christie has a shot of her kicking his ass:

How much do I love this/them?

This is just super-awesome-cool trippy. Everything that’s fun about social media — serendipity, diverse circles coming together, fun conversations. It started with a fun fact that I picked up from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: our digestive tracts have as many neurons (the cells that think in our brains) in them as do our spinal cords. What’s going on here?

The comments below come from former co-workers, a client, my old dog Maggie’s super-wonderful oncologist (I still get teary thinking about how great she was with Maggie), a molecular biologist friend, a poet, a two-time IronMan, an English professor . . . la w00t!

I love this Instructable and wish I could do it for me. The author, responding to that clear-but-squishy-edged school of thought that various stimuli are good for infants, created a remote-controlled pattern of fiber optic lights in his soon-to-be-born baby’s ceiling. He can remotely control the overall brightness, the rate of twinkling, and the phases of the moon (waxing and waning):

Full lesson at Instructables

I like this video (found via Flowing Data) quite a bit, especially the reminder about the fragility of the atmosphere and curve of the horizon line. But is this data visualization or is it fact marketing? Data visualization should take data points and reveal patterns unseeable (or hard to see), or coax a story out of a perceived bunch of noise.

Vizworld just posted an interview with Edward Tufte which is a nice reminder of first principles of data visualization:

Not much has changed since Tufte began offering the Presenting Data And Information lecture years ago, other than a fourth book and a couple of new examples, but not much has to change when the point is returning to the first principles of information design: make wise comparisons, show causality, employ multiple variables and, above all, focus on the content. This point was driven home for me early on in the lecture as I internally formulated a question on one of my favorite topics: “How will the techniques presented in this lecture help me better represent 3d digital cities?” As if my mind had been read, the answer came: “Don’t ask how visualization techniques can help display data. Ask how data can be best represented.”

I like that it’s a statement of positive principles — show causality and comparisons, seek out complexity and richness, etc. — rather than the anti-prescriptions that are often associated with Tufte (avoid chartjunk, eschew Powerpoint).

Love this email I just got from Amazon:

Full disclosure: I get quite a kick out of the Dan Brown oeuvre, despite the horrible writing. It’s like the old computer adventure games made into a book. Literally. The old games — like MYST, Journeyman Project, Tex Murphy, Last Express, Obsidian, Lighthouse, Gabriel Knight, even the fighting adventure games like Resident Evil — had a winning formula:

- gruesome/startling crime in the beginning (Lighthouse wins this one hands down with not one but two great openings: 1) you explore a house with interesting objects, but only when you press the answering machine button to get a hysterical call for help does the game kick in with a great drive through the rain sequence that presents the credits and great animated lightning effects); and 2) when you explore the house of the friend who called you, you see a baby quietly sleeping in its crib. When you return to the baby’s room, you see an alien stealing the child. Seriously jump out of your skin freaky. Dan Brown has the usual Robert Langdon being interrupted in some refined pursuit (dreaming about hiking the pyramids with a babe, or giving a lecture) and then being dragged to a mutilated corpse.

- discovery of solvable riddles — adventure games are riddled with barely- to not even close to plausible riddles that you’re happy to solve. They propel the story. Nearly every image presented in Dan Brown allows the reader to puzzle out the clue.

- obscure reasons for villainy The worst example of this was a ten minute or longer discource in Journeyman Project Turbo. These reasons usually warrant a page or two of monologue and sufficiently flawed logic for Langdon to feel the need to correct the villain on the true meaning of the text. Not quite “that belongs in a museum” but close.

Final disclosure, while I won’t leave my battery on, my morning ritual of turning on the wireless will have an extra jolt of excitement (I like it even when I’m just getting the paper) tomorrow morning.

Ben Fry, creator of Processing (or Proce55ing for those that remember) and data viz guru at MIT, has an absolutely fascinating visualization of how Darwin changed the text of “The Evolution of Species” in the thirteen years following its publication.

The labels across the top are chapter numbers, the dashes underneath represent text from the book which you can see on mouse-over. The color bars indicate the different editions.

I called it fascinating on first look, but should probably be more measured or specific. I hate when we fail to distinguish between fact illustration (making a single thing visual) and data visualization (revealing previously unseen stories through a rich visual worth looking at several times). This falls somewhere in between. The final state of the chart, after the 6th, and lengthiest, revision does tell a story:

The most obvious part of the narrative is the addition of an entire section and extensive revisions to the final section in the 6th edition, indicating a structural bolstering of the argument and possibly responses to ten years of critique. The speckle patterns, small bits of color, show a lot of tinkering/revising in the first three editions. These all support Fry’s introductory point:

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime

I’m wondering, though, whether this illustration tells the story better than the text?

What does make it fascinating overall is the ability to mouse over the sections (the small gray and colored stripes) and read the text underneath. Might be a better tool (if the stripes were a little bit bigger and easier to mouse over) than it is a data viz.

Just saw in his blog that David Byrne has published/will publish Bicycle Diaries an account of his biking around his hometown of NYC and around countries where he’s touring and travelling. It seems kind of cool — after getting hooked on biking in NYC, he started taking a folding bike with him on his travels. I used to work on 12th and Broadway and would see Byrne fairly regularly on his bike — he was elegant, cool, looking at everything with that sense-of-wonder smile. Can’t wait to see the book. (I also saw George Plimpton and Spalding Gray (RIP) in the neighborhood a lot. Plimpton rode what we now seek out as a vintage bike with a ridiculous white basket with a blue flower on the front).

Interesting sidenote: Byrne’s book has already been published in Serbia and the UK, but will be published in mid-September quickly followed by a half-dozen other countries. One of those stars more beloved abroad than here.

Finally, here’s a video from WSJ online of Byrne’s partipation in the bike rack contest that he judged and participated in: