Click here to add link

There's lots of talk about linking. Link, link, link – it's what Bora Z calls the "currency of the web" and a fundamental element in journalism these days. Link out to sources, to scientific papers, to interesting videos or more comprehensive explainers. Linking establishes credibility, trust, and with everything online, it's easier to do than ever before.

So linking is important, got that. But sometimes the writer of a story doesn't either a) know the best places to link, or b) care enough to fill his/her story with useful links. So why is there no easy mechanism for other people (not the original author), to add links themselves, after the story has been published? Someone could be reading the piece an think - oh! I know a great explanatory blog post on exactly that topic, or man, I know a great infographic that illustrates exactly that point, or wow, I wished she had linked to the original study, it took me 15 min to track it down. This wouldn't have to be a free-for-all link fest littering stories with useless spam – it could be moderated by the author.

Kinda like Facebook and photo tagging. Facebook lets you tag yourself or friends in photos that you didn't take, and the request goes to the original photographer, who then approves the tag or not. Couldn't links work the same way?

"So-and-so wants to add a link to your story." [Accept] [Don't Accept]

Seems simple enough to me, and for all I know this already exists in some way shape or form. But as long as stories can be edited and updated after the fact (they certainly can online) and as long as the author wants to make his/her story the most useful as possible, there should be some sort of "add link" mechanism, in addition to regular comments. Now... who knows how to make this happen?

Less or equal to?

I love love love this. A huge, controversial, political, philosophical, racial, social and legal topic captured in three single marks. 

Less or equal to?

Amazing.

Unequally Free? The Social Limits of Liberty

Apr 19, 2011 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

20 Cooper Square, New York, NY

NYU Journalism 7th Floor Commons

Radiation Explained

Spent a good part of last week working on this radiation level infographic, for Studio 20's Building a Better Explainer Project. Check it out over at the Scientific American Guest Blog!

It's WHAT?!

My recent profile of Brooklyn artist Laura Splan, who paints with her own blood, embroiders pathogens, and thinks art shouldn't just be about beauty – it should be about ideas.

With a steady hand Laura Splan dips her paintbrush into a glass vial filled with red ink, brushing one, two, three times against the side to catch any excess drops. In a single sweeping motion, she stains the pristine white surface with a crimson brush stroke that looks an awful lot like…

Blood. It’s Splan’s blood, and it’s her ink of choice. She’s been combining horror and beauty, the biological and the familiar in her artwork for over ten years. For her current project she is using her own blood to paint over vintage doilies, which serve as stencils. When removed from the canvas, the doilies leave behind a series of overlapping, almost floating organic forms – created by the blood seeping into the negative space.

Splan’s sanguine artwork began on a curious whim. “I basically just scrounged up a needle in my house one day and pricked my finger, just to see what it would look like,” said Splan. “I liked what it was doing.”

Splan, 37, an artist and certified phlebotomist (technician trained to draw blood) lives in a small Brooklyn apartment that doubles as her studio. It was during her undergraduate years studying biology at the University of California, Irvine that she realized that “art didn’t have to be about beauty, it could be about ideas.” Scientific ideas continue to inform her art, often surfacing in unexpected ways – like the blood on her paintbrush.

The rest of the story is here. 

Back to the basics of science & data viz

One of my goals for the new year is to take a closer look at the science/design connection – especially presenting lots of data in a coherent (and beautiful) way. To start off, here's a recent article I wrote for the Scientific American Guest Blog about designing and displaying information in science (it's also basically an ode to Tufte). 

Data visualization. Infographics. Ooh, better yet, make that interactive infographics. The recent buzz around the visual display of information makes it seem like everyone should be rushing to whip up some multi-colored cartogram, bubble chart or word cloud. Never before have we had both the tools and the vast amounts of raw data to play around with, and scientists and journalists alike are making fabulous use of this opportunity. From unemployment rates to air traffic patterns to the wealth and health of nations to blood test results, information has never been so fun to look at.

But before we get too carried away with swirling globes and animated charts, it’s worth going back to the basics – taking note of some simple methods for visually presenting data. This endeavor is particularly relevant to science and health, where visual information appears anywhere from diagrams in scientific research papers to public health campaigns. The field of information design is vast, but I’ll concentrate on just a few simple ways to approach the combination of words and pictures. Many examples come straight from Edward Tufte, the information design guru who put the serious study of infographics on the map, so to speak (the New York Times has called him the Leonardo da Vinci of Data). Since the publication of his first book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in 1983, Tufte has demonstrated over and over how the right approach to visual displays can dramatically improve the clarity and effectiveness of data. And in fact, many of the classic principles of good information design can be found throughout the history of science...

The whole thing is here. I'm hoping to write more on this stuff in the near future!

Brains and Choices

Where my blogging effort has gone the past month or so:

The Architecture of Choice: How subtle cues in the environment can effect our decisions

November 11, Nature Education 

The Brain in the Voting Booth: How hidden biases influence our vote

October 27, Scienceline

What Neuroscience Has to Say about Gap's Logo Disaster: (and why designers already knew it)

October 24, Discover

The Brain Scan Appeal: Bringing neuroscience into the courtroom may influence more brains than we think

October 4, Scienceline

It Sounds Blue! Kandinsky and the Brain

The overwhelming "what? that's going on right now too?!" of New York City has hit me for real this month, so the blog posts are sadly lacking. But, since this science journalism stuff means I am bombarded with ideas and stories to write about a day, I'm going to make an extra effort to post more often (I need at least some partial record of my thoughts during these wonderfully-crazy months).

So, for starters, I have to share this amazing series in the New Scientist called "Six ways that artists hack your brain." It's all about the neuroscience and psychology of how we perceive/understand/interpret artwork (or get really confused by it). To my surprise, this cross-disciplinary field even has its own a name: neuroaesthetics. Below is a quote from one section about synaesthetes, people who have a neurological condition where their senses seem to get mixed up – they'll hear blue or taste yellow, for example.

LETTERS, words, numbers, sounds, touch, pain and smell all trigger flashes of colour in Carol Steen's mind. The New York-based artist first discovered she could paint her synaesthetic visions after a visit to her acupuncturist. "Each time a needle went in a colour flashed in front of my eyes," she recalls. "When all the needles were in it was like watching a movie. I rushed home and realised I could recall enough to paint a part of what I had seen."

Other synaesthetic artists include David Hockney and Wassily Kandinsky, who painted the piece below, entitled Blue. There is still some speculation over whether Kandinsky actually had synaesthesia or was simply influenced by reports of the phenomenon in other people. But to Christopher Tyler of the Smith-Kettlewell Brain Imaging Center in San Francisco, who has analysed Kandinsky's work, it is obvious (Journal of the History of Neuroscience, vol 12, p 223). "It's very explicit in his work and his writings. He went to a performance of Wagner's music and then wrote about how vivid the visual impressions of the horns were and the colour that the music evoked in his mind. That's synaesthesia," he says.

Steen agrees: "I saw a sphere like the one in Kandinsky's Blue in one of my acupuncture sessions. Since it is really hard to explain your visions to someone, I assume Kandinsky was a synaesthete." The striking colour contrast with the red dot is also familiar to her.

These experiences are probably due to extra connections between the auditory and visual cortex, says Jack Cowan, a mathematical neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. He thinks the additional flow of information into the visual cortex overloads its normal inhibitory mechanisms, allowing spontaneous waves of activity that would normally be eliminated to propagate through the brain. These signals may represent shape or colour. Since the brain can't tell whether a signal was generated within the brain or externally, synaesthetes see the shapes as if they came from the eye.

Check out the other parts of the series like the emotional response to impressionism or Dali's illusions. More to come soon!

By any other cover?

Rightly or wrongly, we tend to judge books by their covers (ok, just a little bit). Why else would so much time be spent on their design? Some book cover designs are publicly declared great, making lists like the AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers, soon to be an exhibition in New York. Other times they go unnoticed, conveying the stories they contain so clearly they become invisible. And other times... they ruin the whole thing. This great collection of book cover before-and-afters shows just how crucial a cover can be – and highlights the success (or tragedy) of a redesign.

Some examples: 

The Structure of Scientific Activity

What does interdisciplinary look like? Starting from science outwards, it may look something like this crazy multicolored dotted web-wheel. Scientists collected data on over a billion user interactions with online scholarly portals, tracking the activity of scientists and the general public as they clicked through and engaged with publications in all sorts of disciplines. The result? A clickstream map of science that suggests just how interconnected the dynamics of scholarship can be. The wheel's hub is formed from closely-related journals in the social sciences and humanities, while the rim is made up of natural science journals. The spokes are journals that connect across disciplines (fields like brain research, human geography, and alternative energy). 

Besides being pretty to look at, what is this clickstream map good for? Here's what the scientists say:

Maps constructed from clickstream data can serve numerous functions. Like citation maps they provide a means to visually assess the relationships between various domains and journals. However, clickstream maps of science can offer an immediate perspective on what is taking place in science and can thus aid the detection of emerging trends, inform funding agencies, and aid researchers in exploring the interdisciplinary relationships between various scientific disciplines.

It's even getting support from humanities professors, who are chiming in about the map here. I'm all for it – science, bring on the color coding. 


Related Link: article in SEED magazine on networked knowledge and Science 2.0

How French Does Posters

Being in Paris, I think its appropriate to post the gorgeous French posters that have been sitting on my desktop for a while now, in a folder called Designs I Like. I'll be adding to this list, but for now here are some of my favorites:

Of Tools and The World

I've stumbled upon two items recently concerning the role of objects and tools in defining ourselves and how we function (or don't) in day to day life. I don’t really know what to make of this experiment, titled "A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand". It’s seems to be either a naïve overstepping of the bounds of empirical data into some pretty heavy german philosophy, or it’s a fantastically cool example of what science can tell us about ourselves and our being in the world. Here's the explanation from Wired magazine.

An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves. The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.

“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”

 Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us. This idea, called “ready-to-hand,” has influenced artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, but without being directly tested.

On a related note, this talk by Matthew Crawford (author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work), addresses the use of tools and the moral significance of working with your hands. Especially relevant was this quote, which contrasts the character of the narcissist with that of the repairman:

Constantly seeking self-affirmation, the narcissist views everything as an extension of his will, and therefore has only a tenuous grasp on the world of objects as something independent. He is prone to magical thinking and delusions of omnipotence. A repairman, on the other hand, puts himself in the service of others, and fixes the things they depend on. His relationship to objects enacts a more solid sort of command, based on real understanding. For this very reason, his work also chastens the easy fantasy of mastery that permeates modern culture. The repairman has to begin each job by getting outside his own head and noticing things; he has to look carefully and listen to the ailing machine.

The repairman is called in when the smooth operation of our world has been disrupted, and at such moments our dependence on things normally taken for granted (for example, a toilet that flushes) is brought to vivid awareness. For this very reason, the repairman’s presence may make the narcissist uncomfortable. The problem isn’t so much that he is dirty, or uncouth. Rather, he seems to pose a challenge to our self-understanding that is somehow fundamental. We’re not as free and independent as we thought.

Here's a longer piece Crawford wrote last year for the NY Times. I'm off to go use some tools.

Translating into Tuftese

 > "The best statistical graphic ever drawn," according to Tufte.

Obama has just appointed Edward Tufte, master of all things visually communicated, to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel (which advises the board that tracks and explains the $787 billion in stimulus funds). From Newsweek:

"Among fans, Tufte is known as "the Da Vinci of Data." After receiving a B.A. and M.S. in statistics from Stanford and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, the Beverly Hills native launched his academic career by signing on to teach courses in political economy and data analysis at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs. Over time, he became increasingly interested in information design—charts, graphs, diagrams—and in 1982 he took out a second mortgage on his home in order to self-publish his first book on the subject, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It redefined the field and was later named one of Amazon's 100 best books of the century."

Interestingly, Tufte is clear to distinguish the role of a designer as commercial artist with that of a communicator of visual evidence:

"This is about visual thinking and visual evidence," Tufte says. "It's not about commercial art. The last thing in the world that's needed here is a designer. What's needed is an analytical, statistical, quantitative approach. Reporting is different from pitching. Artists who design for marketing purposes inherently have problems with credibility. This is something very different in spirit. It's about accountability and transparency—with heavy, heavy amounts of data."

I might argue that "designer" can incorporate both meanings, including both an artistic and analytical approach. But the purpose is clear: to present information (and lots of it) in a clear, understandable, credible way. I look forward to seeing how a Tufte-approach plays out in Washington.

Finding Way

Slate has a great new article about signage design and the art of wayfinding (why can't we American's get it together?). I'm looking forward to the rest of the six part series. Attention New Yorkers: first up is Penn Station.

"Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us where we are (as when an Interstate marker assures us we're on the right highway) and it helps us to get where we want to go (as when an airport banner directs us to our gate). When it fails, we miss trains, we're late to appointments, we spend hours pacing the indistinguishable floors of underground parking garages, muttering to ourselves in mounting frustration and fury. And in some cases, especially where automobiles are involved, the consequences of bad signage can be fatal."

What the World Needs Now

This was too good not to share...

Here's the street sign the world needs now. Half a stop and half a yield, the sign gives each driver a clear indication of how to behave. Below the red "Take Turns" shield is a small sign reading, "If Cars Are Waiting, Please Stop and Alternate." And if there are no cars waiting, just blow on through. (No more stopping at red lights at 4am, on a country road, when there's no one around for miles.) 

Imagine a world where every street sign contains the word "Please."

Crowdsourcing Science

What does science mean to you? Don't say it; draw it! Tim Jones, a science communicator in London, has initiated a worldwide science art project collecting drawings from scientists, students, journalists, artists – in short, just about everyone. In an attempt to find out the true narratives behind people's view of science, he "persuaded friends and even complete strangers—all of whom belonged to one of three categories: scientists, professional communicators, and the general public—to sit down with a pen and paper and draw what they think is important in science." I think this is a pretty cool idea, and will be checking to see how the project develops. Add your own drawing to the mosaic here.

Typography – What Language Looks Like.

Typography, I hold you responsible.

Responsible for hours spent scrolling through lists of fonts trying to find one that "works" with Copperplate Gothic. Responsible for giddy excitement at discovering free downloads of 1001 Mac Fonts. Responsible for awkward cringes at misused combinations of Futura and Verdana. Responsible for the Helveticazation of the corporate world and the Comic-Sans-zation of public health handouts. Responsible for homework procrastination, magazine destruction, poster fascination, headache provocation, design obsession. What do you have to say for yourself?

I don't know what Typography would say in its defense, but it would probably be in Braggadocio.

More:

Recent NY Times article on type nerds.

Top 100 Fonts of All Time

Design Thinking

>> BCN Design Week Campaign

It’s extremely difficult to exist in Barcelona without noticing some element of design every few minutes – a striking poster, a network of walkways around a park, a coiled stack of churros. But as if that wasn’t enough, Barcelona has its own Design Week, and this year it happens to be at the end of October (what luck!). Among the many Design Week events is a conference on “design thinking.” I’ve run into this term before, usually equating it with “the thought process of a designer”. But what does that mean? Can we really find a “typical” way of thinking in the world of design? I decided this concept was worth a bit more research.

As it turns out, “design thinking” involves much more than the mind of the designer, and may actually challenge our very notion of design. As Tim Brown notes in his new book “Change by Design”, design thinking is an interactive, collaborative, nonlinear, human-centered approach to solving problems. It’s a move away from intellectual exercise to actual experience, as well as a change from design-by-designers to design-by-all. Or, more accurately, design-from-all. The notion that good design must be achieved by the expert who knows how to apply all the rules is replaced by the idea that good design comes from many people (the more the better) and rules are just barriers to innovation.

This all sounds very abstract, but the applications of design thinking are real, and pretty exciting. Rather than limiting design to making things more attractive or easier to use, design thinking encompasses a much broader range of approaches, ideas, and systems to make a better human experience. Brown gives an example of a Japanese bike company that wanted to try something new to jumpstart a lagging business. Instead of starting with the bike (adding specialized features, developing a slick new look) it considered the experience of bike riding. Many people have fond childhood memories of riding a bicycle. But the majority of them keep these memories stored away alongside the dusty, unused bikes in their basement. Why don't more adults ride bikes? A team of designers, marketers, engineers and social scientists worked together to answer this question. They identified several real concerns that kept adults away from bikes: anxiety about entering a professional bike store, confusion about the many bike accessories and parts, worries about safety on the road. Designing a better looking bike was not going to help – this team decided they needed to develop a new, simple bike riding experience. The end result was an innovative “coasting” bike that hid an automatic gear-shifting technology in a basic bike framework – no confusing handlebar controls or cables. Advertising campaigns included phrases like: “Chill. Explore. Dawdle. Lolygag. First one there’s a rotten egg.” The company even worked with local communities to post safe riding routes on the web. The coasting bike was hugely popular. This project was not just a bike re-design, it was design thinking applied to bike riding – and its success shows just how powerful this type of thinking can be.

The implications of design thinking could be immensely helpful as we go about solving other human-centered problems like health care, education, or security. Taking a step back from small-scale objects to community (or global) experiences may be the only way we can begin to move forward on these very critical issues.

More on design thinking after the conference...

In Combination

Somehow this article in Seed Magazine manages to combine almost every single one of my interests – remarkable. I can’t wait for more from Seed's design column.  As I try to write my personal statement for grad school and form a coherent narrative about my interests and my life, it’s a nice reminder that philosophy, science and design can all be connected!

More links:
Design and the Elastic Mind, 2008 MoMA exhibit
Core Principles, an earlier Seed article about the interface of science and design

Less corners, more conversation.

> aerial view of l'Eixample district

It took me a little while to figure it out. I was walking much more than seemed necessary, considering the market was only a few blocks away. But for each small advance I made in the straight line, there was a diagonal detour to get to the crosswalk. I must have had quite a puzzled look on my face as I passed by several elderly men, chatting outside on picturesque little coffee tables with their café amb llet (coffee with milk). That was another thing. How was it possible that every street corner was brimming with chairs, people and conversations?

And then I realized the two were connected. Each block was cut off at the corners, a rectangular octagon rather than a perfect square. This effectively created a lively, open space out of a congested intersection, with four beautiful facades facing towards the middle.

As I later found out, the man responsible for this genius idea of urban planning is Ildefons Cerdà, who designed a massive new expansion of the city in 1859. The Eixample district (where I live!) is the main achievement of his grand Project for the Extension of Barcelona, which laid out his visions of a city based on the values of functionality, equality, mobility, and communication. He was concerned with the crowded living conditions of Barcelona’s old town–unsanitary and isolating–as well as the unequal access to city services by different social classes. His new grid would allow for easier and more efficient transportation (by foot, carriages, and later, railways), and the beveled street corners were intended to provide ample room for public spaces, greenery, and dialogue. His plan even extended to legal and financial regulations, which encouraged mixed-income housing and enabled poor workers to live together in apartments with wealthy families.

Ironically, in a city that loves curves, Cerdà’s grid turned out to be immensely successful. While much of present-day Barcelona is very different from his original plan (for example, many of the green spaces were filled in to accommodate more people and more parking), his urban designs are, literally, around every corner. And his efforts to encourage communication have been quite successful–as evidenced by all the chatter.

Barcelona

> El Parque Güell, Barcelona

For the next 3 months, I'll be in Barcelona (!) I'm posting all my photos here. Today involved a lot of walking. And some very pretty mosaics.

And so the adventures begin...