I’m very excited to announce that I will be co-teaching a two-day introduction to Processing at the new Gray Area Foundation for the Arts here in San Francisco! The workshop is the first in a series on creative coding, and coincides with Gray Area’s grand opening celebrations and initial exhibition, featuring work by C.E.B. Reas, Camille Utterback, and Stamen Design.

The Gray Area folks have created an amazing space downtown, and this workshop is an exciting chance to learn a ton of great new skills, and even meet one of Processing’s co-initiators. (C.E.B. will be making an appearance.)

The workshop is scheduled for Saturday, October 3rd & Sunday, October 4th, 1:00 – 6:00pm both days.

See GAFFTA’s site for the complete schedule, details, and registration.

Thanks to TechCrunch for capturing some video of App Store visualization on display at Apple’s WWDC conference this week. A massive grid of iPhone application icons, arranged by color, pulsates as each app is purchased through the App Store.

I generated this image from the genetic code of a California case of H1N1 (posted today by the CDC). I fed the data into my color tools project, and assigned one color for each base found in DNA: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). The colors were chosen by searching ColourLovers for each of those base names and using the top result, i.e. the “best” colors for A, C, G, and T, according to ColourLovers.

I’ve been thinking about how best to auralize data. I realize that’s not a real word (yet), but consider auralization to be visualization’s auditory sibling. The music video by Johannes Kreidler above, while hokey, is both innovative and entertaining.

Add Chris Jordan to the list of people I want to meet.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about data visualization as a narrative form. How can data be presented so that it truly tells a story in addition to revealing unseen information?

This student art project at Dartmouth College renders a polar bear on-screen. When electricity use in the dorm is high, the temperature rises, the ice melts, and the polar bear falls into the arctic waters. By unplugging, students can help the cuddly character “live” happily on the ice in a cool climate.

It’s a data visualization at its core, but by using a cute character—as opposed to a bar chart—the presentation triggers an emotional response and truly tells a story. Not only that, but the story is interactive, and the viewer/participant’s behavior determine the outcome.

Announcing the release of new research on visualizing network relationships. Play with the demo, download the presentation poster, and read the research paper.

From Michael Chang, the guy who brought true scalable type to Processing, comes a demo reel of data vis interaction inspiration. In my own work, I’ve focused on just “getting it to work” and display the data, but now I want to make sure the whole experience is as beautiful and fluid as in Chang’s work.

For my next project at Berkeley, I created a real time visualization of estimated train arrival times within the BART system. So next time you need to head over to the East Bay, just check the visualization and you can see how far away your train is from the station.

More detail on the project and process behind it are documented here. Thanks to BART for making their arrivals data available!

Launch project >