High Performance Visualization

Screen shot of visualizationI’m working with the folks at our local HPC consortium, SHARCNET on imagining how we could visualize texts with high resolution displays, 3D displays, and cluster computing. The project, temporarily called The Big See has generated an interested beta version. You can see a video on the process running and images from the final visualization here, Version Beta 2.

One of the unanticipated insights from this project is that the process of building the 3D model, which I will call the *animation*, is as interesting as the final visual model. From the very first version you could see the text flowing up and the high frequency words jostling each other for position. Words would start high and then slide clockwise around. Collocations build up as it goes. We don’t have the animation right, but I think we are on to something. You can see Version B2 as an MP4 animation here.

Now we will start playing with the parameters – colours, transparency, and weight of lines.

New universities and new presidents

Compare the announcement of KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) KAUST’s Unique Vision to John Maeda’s vision for the Rhode Island School of Design, risd’s next president. KAUST will be a new university with a large endowment that is for graduate students only. RISD is a design school that has just hired one of the leaders in design and technology away from MIT’s Media Lab. They are both exciting developments, but different in so many ways. Here is part of the vision of the new president of KAUST:

to conduct high impact research unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries, to create a new ecosystem for research unfettered by organizational strictures, and to build meaningful partnerships across communities, cultures and continents. (President’s Acceptance Message)

Thanks to Alex for the KAUST link and to Shawn for the RISD link.

SET 26

Image of GROCK

SET 26 is a Swiss design company that sells furniture shaped like letters from the Roman alphabet. Each letter costs about 1,500 Euros and has doors that open revealing shelves. They have a Konfigurator so you can see any combination of 5 letters in the available colours (like the GROCK above.)

I read about this in a strange online Facsimile Magazine while reading a reproduction of a 1970 Time Life Books’ Nature/Science Annual article on “Art’s New Ally – Science.” The article documents a number of technological arts projects including the Experiments in Arts and Technology (E.A.T.) cooperative founded by Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg.

The High Concept

ETC LogoCarnegie Mellon is going global with their Masters in Entertainment Technology program. They have a campus in Adelaide, Australia and are adding new ones in Japan and Singapore. The High Concept is project based learning where people from an arts or technology background learn to work together and deepen their understanding of entertainment technology. It has the virtue of weaving arts and computing students together rather than segregating them.

The “high concept” behind both the Entertainment Technology Center and the Masters in Entertainment Technology degree is that we are based on the principle of having technologists and non-technologists work together on projects that produce artifacts that are intended to entertain, inform, inspire, or otherwise affect an audience/guest/player/participant. The masters degree is focused on extensive semester-long project courses. This focus allows us to tackle the much larger challenge of effectively bringing together students and researchers from different disciplines.

We do not intend to take artists and turn them into engineers, or vice-versa. While some students will be able to achieve mastery in both areas, it is not our intention to have our students master “the other side.” Instead, we intend for a typical student in this program to enter with mastery/training in a specific area and spend his or her two years at Carnegie Mellon learning the vocabulary, values, and working patterns of the other culture.

Is global programs simultaneously offered in different regions an answer to distance education? After all it is cheaper for instructors to move than students. Could faculty find they are part of multi-university programs instead of affiliated with one university?

The site also has a good list of similar programs elsewhere, which I think is generous. More programs should be honest about the alternatives.

Human Beans: Provocative Design

Human Beans: Family Project Fictional Package

Human Beans is a provocative design group that I read about in a great article “Unstated Contributions – How Artistic Inquiry Can Inform Interdisciplinary Research” by Chris Rust in International Journal of Design (vol. 1, no. 3, 2007.) Rust cites Human Beans as an example of designers experimenting with fictional products (like the Family Project) as a form of conceptual art. Their information page says,

Human Beans create provocative concepts.

We make fictional products by hacking commercial culture and we design new services by working with real people

Our aim is to challenge assumptions and point in new directions, we diffuse our thinking through spam, the press, shop shelves and exhibitions.

Rust’s article gives examples of a number of ways that creative practices can intersect with research without becoming research. Artists can generate a world within which researchers can understand and pose questions for methodological research. Artists can provoke questions. Artists can re-present knowledge in more communicative ways. Above all, for Rust, the contribution of the artist is not the explicit propositional knowledge that can be reviewed and tested. The contribution of an artist is something that the audience has to interpret and complete. It isn’t art if an artist studies the use of their work and tries to plan its interpretation to constrain a particular thesis. I should add that Rust seems to have been involved in the UK discussions around what we call research/creation here in Canada.

20 sites

I just stumbled on this remarkable art project by Tom Phillips (his Humument project was mentioned here earlier by Geoffrey in connection with emergent/altered texts). He has created slideshow galleries of 20 locations around London that he has photographed once each year for the last 35 years. Watching, we see some sites barely change while some are dramatically altered.

Oddly, what struck me most was the transformation of the cars: abstractly I remember those generations of cars (or their north american relatives) from my childhood on up, though I can no longer place them in any visual context in memory, except in a sort of cinematic way.
site 17 first
site 17 last

Productivity Illuminated by Email

An interesting story on a study from MIT. Using datamining techniques, researchers looked at corporate email use and draw some interesting conclusions on productivity — measuring information-worker productivity being an area considered particularly difficult, apparently. The specific conclusions presented in the overview aren’t breathtaking, indeed, they rather confirm the sorts of things about people I like to assume, and their broader conclusions sound slightly breathless, but plausibly move beyond mere speculation.

What is most interesting is the appearance of email as a starring player at a time when most people talking about digital communication seem to have given up on it; of further interest would be application of some ideas behind the research to non-email communication.

First found at bettercourse.org (via infovore) where more interesting comments may be found.

Social Marketing wisdom from the cartoonist

cartoon
I just discovered Hugh MacLeod and in the course of browsing his cartoons stumbled on this gem:

Somewhere along the line I figured out the easiest products to market are objects with “Sociability” baked-in. Products that allow people to have “conversations” with other folk. Seth Godin calls this quality “remarkablilty”.

For example: A street beggar holding out an ordinary paper cup cup won’t start a conversation. A street beggar holding out a Starbucks cup will. I know this to be true, because it happened to me and a friend the other day, as we were walking down the street and a guy asked us for some spare change. Afterwards, as we were commenting about the rather sad paradox of a homeless guy plying his trade with a “luxury” coffee cup, my friend said, “Starbucks should be paying that guy.”

Actually, my friend is wrong. Starbuck’s doesn’t need to be paying the homeless guy. Because Starbucks created a social object out of a paper cup, the homeless guy does their marketing for free, whether he knows it or not.

Although I suspect he does. I suspect somewhere along the line the poor chap figured out that holding out a Starbucks cup gets him more attention [and spare change] than an ordinary cup. And suddenly we’re seeing social reciprocity between a homeless person and a large corporation, without money ever changing hands. Whatever your views are on the plight of homeless people, this is “Indirect Marketing” at its finest.

This, along with a recently read post by Doc Searl, leaves me wistfully wondering why I never hear this kind of talk from the marketing people I know. Not that I want to encourange any of them to think up new ways to exploit the homeless.