AMY E MARTIN // Blog

For my interactive studio, we're working on data visualizations. As we're only going over it for a couple of weeks, we're doing really basic stuff. I've decided to look at movie data and so far I've got a couple of draft visualizations.

This first one is a simple plot of the top 20 most popular movies (according to IMDB) from various genres over time. Though the colors are too dark, the graph shows basic trends like the popularity of Westerns in the 60s or how more recent animation is much more popular than, say, Fantasia.

I also took the roles of Oscar winning actresses and actors and grouped them into categories so we could see media-based gender roles. This is a much looser interpretation of the data (my categories are obviously somewhat arbitrary based on what I saw as trends) but it's an interesting study nonetheless. As these sketches are done in Processing they take a bit of time for me and my non-programmer brain so I've only fully completed the actresses sketch but here's a screenshot.

This assignment is quite a bit of fun and while the math and programming for most of the beautiful visualizations at places like Visual Complexity is beyond me at the moment, I hope to do some hand drawings, some more intricate illustrations in Illustrator and perhaps a physical data representation of some sort.

Labels: data visualization, interactive, school work

Thursday, February 26, 2009 // 0 Comments

So I went to Compostmodern (a sustainable design conference in San Francisco presented by the AIGA this weekend) for Speak Up and instead of writing an article about it, I decided to do a summary info graphic instead. It seemed to me that the first four presentations were ways to reconsider design in the context of sustainability and the last four presentations were how to take those designs out into the world.

Here's the link to the full size PDF:
compostmodern_info.pdf

Labels: #CM09, compostmodern

Monday, February 23, 2009 // 0 Comments

So we presented our final versions of our clocks yesterday. I was up for most of the week trying to complete them all, unfortunately I did not finish the rain clock or the atomic clock, but there's a bunch of other stuff that's up now (though it requires serious polishing). Here are some of my favorites.

Petri dish clock from below ended up being new petri dish clock above. Sound/cat clock doesn't display the time visually other than responding to a heartbeat sample that beats every second and speeds up over the course of the minute. Every 15 minutes a sample of my cat's voice plays and at the top of the hour, an alarm with a scary cat sound plus a chime that rings the hours goes off.

Block clock just spins. The hours are the darkest, the minutes are the lighter brown (in 5 minute chunks) and the white smaller blocks are the seconds.

Storm clock is the least clock-like of my clocks. Rain falls according to the milliseconds but it's impossible to read. At the top of every minute lightning flashes and thunder booms to tell the hour. Growing up in the South, thunderstorms were common. We'd count "one-one thousand, two-one thousand" after every lightning flash to see how far away the storm was. My storm clock takes that memory and applies it telling the time. If you count the seconds after the lightning hits, the thunder will sound at the correct hour.

Labels: interactive, school work

Friday, February 13, 2009 // 0 Comments

I did not document any of my work from last semester online. Or it is all online, but at the CCA Graduate Design website where it doesn't really stand out in any particular way. We did a lot of work, however, and at some point (in the fantastic future where free time is cheaper and more readily available than, say, cat fur in my apartment) I will post them. In the meantime, here are a couple of screenshots of some of my Processing work last semester. I have all the pieces posted on the CCA dada website but I don't imagine that will stick around once I graduate plus I hate tildes.

(UPDATE: I've posted all of my sketches on my own site. Visit my interactive portfolio pages for a link to the sketches and more screenshots.)

Labels: interactive, processing, school work

Monday, February 2, 2009 // 0 Comments

We're working with Processing in both of my interactive studios right now so my brain wants to combine the projects. For my early class we're still working on clocks. For my later class, we're still working on valentines. I seem to have combined the camera code from the valentines with the clock dot code I was working on for the clocks and we have camera clock! The computer vision aspect of this clock is more or less superfluous. The squares rotate and lighten with each second of the clock but it isn't really that spectacular of a *thing*. I like the dots clock part (the clock below reads 01:03:43 for example) but I didn't create that either. I just copied it from a clock I saw over the holidays.

Primarily, I've been trying to condense my code. Processing has hour(), minute(), second() functions which makes it super easy to read from the computer's system clock but there is such a huge repetition of functions that there must clearly be a way for an actual programmer (as opposed to me, the hack) to write this code in a few lines instead of 500. Go object oriented programming for designers who are like, "huh?!"

Also, say hello to my straight forward analog clock. After spending WAY too much time trying to figure out the math for getting Processing to read milliseconds from the system clock instead of from when the program started, I just imported a java library that does all that for me and so I got a smooth second hand. Of course, I kept seeing a petri-dish in my old clock so I took out the numbers, turned the face hands (lines) into points and drew a bunch of random dots on the background. Petri-dish clock enabled!

And yeah, at some point, whenever I have the portfolio part of this site done, I will upload actual working applets instead of these screenshots. The programs are way more fun when they're bouncing and moving around.