Thinky.org is the personal blog of Zach Pousman. I am a designer, researcher, and strategist at the intersection of people and technology. Here you'll find a collection of stuff from my travels around the internet. I like info graphics & visualizations, well-designed goods and services, effective advertising, and novel interaction techniques.
One of the best things about the show Mad Men is how accurate the show is to it’s source cultural moment of the ‘golden age of advertising’ in New York. Unlike other period shows like The Playboy Club and Pan Am, Mad Men’s costuming, sets, styling, and even speech attempt to accurately reflect some deep [...]
Where are we watching video content? TV is still the juggernaut. Data is from a Nielsen report for the last half of 2011. And here’s a different source, but platform matters when it comes to watching video too. People love a big screen, but they also love the iPad screen.
There’s rhetorical uses of information visualization, and then there’s this. Just look at the scale on the left and then look at how well and poorly the values line up on the line chart. Especially over there at the end (9.1, 9.0, 8.6). Can’t. Make. The. Line. Go. Down. What a gem.
Dear Apple, this would be an actual reason to have have a glass back on your phone models. Please consider adding a simlar grid of LEDs behind the glass for ambient updates (click on the ‘illumination demo’), notifications, and even ambient depictions of our activity and the activity of others. Thanks, Zach.
‘YEKPARE’ (monolithic) from nerdworking on Vimeo. This kinda beats the crap out of the Coca-Cola building wrap.
Here’s a quick now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t graph “fix” from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. The graph on the left is how the original creator from the WSJ chose to divvy up the bins. Each bar represents the total aggregate taxable income for the group, but each bin is quite arbitrary (some span $10,000, others $5 million). But [...]
Owen Mundy, an artist and designer focused on data-driven works, created a facebook app to export all of your Facebook data: relationships (in graphviz dot format even!), posts, and other meta data. It’s called Give Me My Data and I’m going to scrape my Facebook data today. It works with Nodebox, which is a Python [...]
The Dunwoody Georgia Police Department completed a recent experiment: They tweeted each and every 911 call that came through their dispatcher from Friday 4/8 6:00 AM until Saturday morning at 6 AM. There were #111 tweets, spanning the gamut of traffic stops, domestic disturbances, robberies, and suspicious (read “gang”) activities. Even a sound complaint or [...]
I put my slides from my recent CSCW 2008 talk up on slideshare (thanks Joe McCarthy for *encouraging* us…) here. You can also see my slides from my Ubicomp 2008 presentation back in September. Hope you enjoy the slides… They’re not quite as good without me gesticulating wildly during the whole thing.
The entirety of Ben Fry’s acknowledgments page for his master’s thesis. A picture is worth a thousand thanks. Post script—he didn’t get to do this for his PhD thesis (it’s just a normal “thanks mom and dad!” page).
Man, do I ever wish I was going to Pervasive this year. First of all, it’s in Sydney Australia. I so so want to get down there. Second, there are some really good workshops that will take place the weekend before the conference. I’m helping to review submissions for the Pervasive Expression workshop, organized by [...]
Next week, I’ll be in the Netherlands for the Sensami symposium. This symposium is organized by the largest technical universities in Holland through their computer science student organizations (on a side note, I’d just like to say how I love democratic socialist countries where student unions have so much power and money!). I’ll also be [...]
The Challenge of Information Visualization Evaluation Catherine Plaisant There are 4 traditional methods for evaluation of Information Visualization: Controlled Experiments comparing design elements – compare specific widgets, compare mappings of information to graphical display Usability Evaluation of a tool – used to provide feedback on the problems users encounter with a tool Controlled Experiments comparing [...]
Authors: Pederson E., Sokoler, T. “We have developed a prototype architecture that makes up the technical framework for further use studies. The prototype encompasses capture of auditory and visual data, abstraction of such data into compact streams, synthesizing of auditory, visual and haptic imagery from streams of abstract data, and finally display at the receiving [...]
