The Days the Air Stood Still and Started Buzzing Again

itoworld.com has published this amazing visualisation of the Northern European airspace returning to use after being closed due to volcanic ash. Due to varying ash density across Europe, the first flights can be seen in some areas on the 18th and by the 20th everywhere is open. The data is a mashup from flightradar24.com, openstreetmap.org and contributors.

I am still wondering why there were so few flights to accumulate data to confirm or falsify the data of the models that predicted the ash concentration over Europe and were the basis for the airspace lockdown. I only heard of one flight over Germany. Do we know the data was right?

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

The Clutter, Visualized

Dutch Design studio STUDIO SMACK has created this video to demonstrate “the immense scale of the visual bombardment” we encounter every day. Sure, in theory we have all heard the numbers of the many thousands of messages we encounter everyday, but what does it mean? In the video, all texts, logos, ads competing for our attention are highlighted white, everything else is black.

That’s quite some clutter to break through and to paraphrase PSFK, it makes you think how visible advertising really is. (btw, the video is Creative Commons licensed, very useful for presentations)

KAPITAAL from STUDIO SMACK on Vimeo.

Via PSFK.com

Brand tags

BMW brand tags

Noah Brier has done a small website with a great, yet simple idea. Brand tags simply collects tags and comments for brands by users entering the site and then displays the tag clouds. More than 100.00 people have tagged already giving an interesting look at all the brands on the site.

I always thought that tagging and tag clouds or web 2.0 things like tweetclouds are great tools to analyze and display the results of interviews and focus groups. What works with brand tags on the larger scale can be done for single client, too.

 

 

New Maps Of The World

Via the Creative Review Blog I found this interesting exhibition at the New York MoMA: “Design and the Elastic Mind” running February 24–May 12, 2008.

This exhibition highlights many projects small and large where design made data legible, turning it into information. And sometimes into objects of breathtaking beauty. Like the image above: Barrett Lyon’s map of the internet from 2003, The Opte Project.

Too bad I will not be in New York anytime soon, but there is an excellent and extensive online exhibition available. If you are in any way interested in visualization of data you should absolutely positively check it out.

View the online exhibition here. (does not work with Safari, use Firefox if on a Mac)

There are so many awesome things to be found. I hope I will have some time later today to browse through the site.