Eyeo,
Data, Interaction and History
This year I had the distinct pleasure to be a voluteer at the Eyeo festival, an annual meetup of some of the most creative and interesting minds in design, code and data visualisation. Eyeo is only three years old but is bursting at the seams. Some ~630 people bought tickets for this year’s event which sold out completely in 30 minutes. It’s hot. Though I wasn’t able to catch every talk due to my clerical duties, I left the weekend pretty saturated with new ideas. Here are a few key takeaways from the event:
Although data is often treated as a preexisting truth, it is in fact a rhetorical device that is as much generated as it is found. Colloquially, we understand data to be a mix of numbers that we sort of “harvest” from the phenoma of life. For most people, data appears to be something just waiting to be grabbed and decoded. This understanding of data ignores its essential function — people use data to persuade. Thus, the political will to produce data, where and how it is used, and who it is used by, all factor into a very hazy definition. Unfortunately though, our empirically driven culture looks at data and assumes truth.
Don’t worry. A better understanding of data actually opens up interesting space for designers. Of course there are moments when it’s important to try use visual design to elucidate and make meaning out of research. Designers are great at this. But there is also room for designers to make meaning from out of data without relying on its truthiness. Take Nick Felton for example. He has turned his incessant self-measurement into a visual platform. The primary value of his work lies in its visual ingenuity and not in what it uncovers about human behavior. You see what you want to see in those graphs and that’s whats beautiful about them. Feltron uses data to create form, a prime example of what eyeo is all about and something that will definitely inspire some future projects for myself.
2. Systems Show Insight Through Interaction
I was able to catch the majority of insect smarts my first day as a volunteer. This was a workshop on emergent and complex systems that focused on modeling insect behavior. The examples started with simple particle systems — ants colliding in a space. In these systems, each insect was an actor in a greater system and would follow an algorithm that governed its interaction with other insects. Integral to these examples was the ability to adjust environmental variables “on the fly” with simple GUI sliders. This ability to adjust independent varibles was the true value of these experiments. Sure, you can model swarm patterns with code, but its only by watching the interaction change that you can concieve of the bounds of the system itself. I suppose this is the entire essence of emergence which is the tendency for combinations of simple interactions to create a bigger picture. It was only through the visual interaction with the varibles in these systems that allowed the emerging complexity to shine through. In sum: good digital design = mutable varibles.
My final lesson from eyeo was about the importance of history in the business of design, programming and seeing. I had the pleasure of hearing about the neolucida project, a manufacturing project that seeks to make an old, controversial technology available on a mass scale. The neolucida is a sort of DIY camera lucida that was intended not just to help people draw but to open a conversation about seeing, drawing and artistic authority. Its controversy comes from a book that claims that many of the greatest painters in fine art’s past actually used camera lucida like devices to make their most prized paintings. Naturally this claim inflamed many curators and art heads. But it brings up some essential questions about art making. Is using a technology some form of cheating? How did the aesthetic of painting change with the influence of visual aids? What constitutes artistic excellence?
Indeed these are interesting questions but my interest here is in history itself. As designers, artists and even as programmers it is essential that we consider the historical conventions and technologies at play in our work. The film camera made painting more abstract. What then has the digital done to visual art? this is what form and code explores and is something we need to keep in mind as we fly forward making things.
Email me when Hacking the Mainframe publishes stories