Nicholas Felton has been producing a wonderful series of personal information graphics called ‘Feltron Annual Reports‘, released around New Years every year, starting in 2005. Each year they have become more and more detailed and in this blog post he describes his exploratory design process how he has started using Processing to deal with the complicated data sets and to explore visual representations of these.
Snippet from the blog post:
“…other applications I developed were much more rudimentary, and unlike the topographic program, were developed during the design process in response to immediate design requirements.”
“I knew what data I wanted to use for the cover of the report. This included the number of encounters I had with a person, the number of reports they submitted and the length of time we had known each other. From the outset this was an unwieldy dataset including over 200 items with three characteristics each. I knew that the shape of the data would define the composition, but I had no quick way to find that shape without using Processing. As soon as I made my first sketch with the data, I saw the challenges. When I used circles to represent the number of encounter, reports and duration for the x or y axis, most of the points lined up along one side. In other words, most of the people who responded were people I met in 2009. As interesting as that is, the composition was lacking, but I saw the solution.”
“By using a radial graph to plot the data, I could choose a chart that matched the shape of the data. This put the few people who knew me the longest (Mom, Dad and my sister) in the smallest part of the circle, it’s center. While the most data-cramped part of the graph coincided with the largest part of the form, it’s circumference. I randomized the angle between the point and the center for each entry and tinkered with a scaling factor for everything, added labels to the participants with more than a given threshold of encounters, then ran the application several times until it spat out a nice composition. Finally I imported the graphic into Illustrator and started cleaning things up and integrating it into my design.”
Airspace reboot
As Europe’s airspace came to a halt due to the volcanic eruption on Iceland in April, I came across flightradar24.com – a site that provides live tracking of commercial flights over Europe, all planes equipped with an ADS-B transponder can be tracked:
Flightradar24 is an community project where the data is uploaded by contributors across the continent. Most of Europe is covered but more data collections are always welcome, you can join in:
Sadly flightradar24 doesn’t provide an API for their data (yet?) – but here is a visualization of the “airspace reboot” by UK company ito using flightradar24 data.