Over the past couple of months I feel very fortunate to have been invited to co-ordinate and implement a 5 minute promotional motion piece for this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The piece was produced on behalf of Live:lab and my brief was to capture the essence of this internationally recognised event and to convey a disjointed presence within the piece. I also wish to express my thanks to Luke Willetts who implemented some of the features and for his support along the way. Please feel free to play the short excerpt below.

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A few images on location:

My data visualisation application for the company MailChimp is now in its development stage with v0.9 beta. This version can be played below and demonstrates the ability to; move the filtering panel, to minimize it and to also maximize it. The filtering slider also shows how this tool can span a range from 0-100%, which will later be developed to control data.

Before I actually start the implementation stage of the application I feel it relevant to firstly consider the design of its interface. I mentioned previously that for this study, MailChimp analysed over 200 million emails and from these managed to draw these specific conclusions. In light of this, I have thought up the application name ‘RE:SCOOP’, which I feel conveys the process of collecting data from all these sources and compiling them as a resource for other companies to learn from.

My main consideration with this application is to 1. how the data could be filtered and 2. how the data (currently in tabular form) could be shown visually as individual nodes.

This first design below shows the relationships between the data, whereby a visual link is constructed between similar nodes and each subject line node is given a related colour depending on their ‘open rate’ percentage. The higher the percentage, the more distinct and ‘red’ their colour.

On the left, I have considered a possible filtration facility, which would ultimately allow the user to control what data they see, and more importantly to control the data that is relevant to them. The data I have been given to work with includes 1. The open rate of each email, 2. That email’s subject line, and 3. An associated comment on that subject line concluded by the company. However, the filtering panel below also has the ability to filter by category, which I feel I should take into consideration if this application were to be used commercially. For example this application could be linked up to a central email database where the filtering process can be used to its potential with a larger amount of more unique data.

This second design shows the fourth element of information I have available to me for use in this application. This information is written by the company and concludes the year’s statistics. Even though I feel this information is very textual, I still feel it is relevant to include as part of the application as it is still a valuable resource that other companies may find very useful. This panel would ideally be kept hidden as shown in the design above, with the ability to expand only when needed.

Because I am designing and implementing this application for a real world company, I have been given actual data to work with and so I feel it necessary to preliminary analyse this data and consider how I can use this effectively in my application.

The images below show how the data is currently displayed on their website.

This data is currently in a very tabular format and lacks engaging content and stimulating features. However the most important information here is the subject line itself, which I will use to denote the node itself, the open rate and the comment/conclusion by the company. The open rate is a piece of data that I could potentially use to filter the information, which could add a new dimension to the application; allowing the user to control the information they wish to view.

The final element of data available is a lengthy conclusion written by the company which annually concludes their findings from their study.

From here I will take into consideration these factors and the data and begin to develop designs for the application.

Below is another draft composition for my Visual Studies module. My intention here was to represent the workers scene in the film Metropolis.

One of my final compositions for this term’s visual studies module will reflect the scenes of destruction in H.G. Wells’ film, “Things to Come”. Recently I took the opportunity to photograph a local destruction site and developed the composition shown below:

Looking into how I could implement this type of idea I have developed a quick example of an entity randomly moving around a stage. Furthermore, when the user moves over the ’statistic’ we are shown more information.

Ok so thinking about progressing with by brief, as I mentioned previously I have been looking into such existing solutions such as Digg Labs and the work of San Francisco Design & technology studio Stamen Design. I think these two examples, especially Digg Labs echo more relevantly how a data visualisation could be designed and implemented because the applications are dealing with similar data structure to myself. Another area of inspiration comes from the work of Ben Fry, although I feel his work reflects more aesthetic purposes in the form of ’sketches’ as opposed to more relevant applications such as the ones built for Digg. Taking inspiration from these and looking into how they are implemented I feel that my application would be most appropriate being developed in Flash. My experience also leads me to this conclusion because of the nature of my project, whereby this is to be published online and hence I turn to Flash as an industry standard. An alternative standard could also be Processing, however I feel I have a better understanding of ActionScript and so I think this would allow me to build a more effective working solution.

When researching into other examples of data applications I came across this example on the processing website http://carohorn.de/anymails/ This application is actually quite relevant to my purpose and deals with visualising an entire email client, which is done very very well. I especially find the areas of depth quite interesting, whereby the emails are conveyed as almost living entities. Furthermore these entities visually decay as time progresses and the email gets older. These are the types of things I want to consider in my own application and as I develop through the design and implementation stages.

There are a number of different features that I think I should take into consideration at this time which can potentially reflect the outcome of my solution. Such issues as ’should it be interactive?’ I feel is an important question to raise and I can perhaps look into the possibility of adapting the interface so the user engages with the data more directly.

Below is a preliminary design taking into consideration what data I have, and I think the most relevant information to address is the recorded ‘top open rate subject lines’ and likewise the ‘low open rate subject lines’. I feel in this situation if users can see examples o the more appropriate subject lines then they are more likely to take more away from their research than a written textual conclusion or a range of percentages for example.

In this design I have the idea of each of the subject lines and their open rate percentage to animate onto the stage randomly and thereafter continue to move in a random fashion and perhaps interact with other subject lines in turn. Notice here how I have divided the best and worst vertically to visually separate the data for easy viewing.

If I were to think about this idea as interactive I could consider the possibility of having the user click any of the subjects (denoted by a ball/icon), which then expands to reveal more information and comments on that particular stat.

From here I’d like to think more about how I can represent the other annual information with a view to making links between them.

My posts have been a little slow this week, so I am going to take the opportunity to just put out a quick update with what i am up to and to also introduce a couple of other projects I am involved with.

for those that are not aware, this year I feel proud to have stepped in as Editor of Streetgraphic; the online creative arts magazine and now we are underway with 2nd year University, Streetgraphic has taken on 3 members, Lee, Emma and Lewis who I feel have already brought a weight of commitment and productivity to the magazine and I am looking forward to the months ahead. Please feel free to visit us at http://www.streetgraphic.com.

I am also currently thinking about setting up a Streetgraphic event in the near future and am having a meeting tomorrow regarding location so I’ll be sure to keep a log here of our progress.

As well as Streetgraphic, I am excited to be involved with the upcoming Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, for which I am implementing the event’s motion piece to be aired between the 16th and 25h November. Things are going well and I feel this experience has already helped to develop my skill set in this area and I feel fortunate to have met some great people along the way.

Haha, ok this is amazing, I have just received an email……ok wait stop I’ll jump back a few days.

After my first initial thoughts last week I did some more research around the idea of ‘Re:’ and thought about how I can apply this term to industry facing technologies! Luckily this inspiration came straight from FOWA and from a talk held on the Entrepreneur stage entitled ‘Next Generation Visualisations’. Actually I’ll make a point of posting some of the work I saw there later on as I could use that for reference.

I started to think how I can apply this to ‘Re:’ and if instead of setting up a portal and a discussion between peers, if I could alternatively approach a real world company and implement it for them! (I am all for applying my thoughts to real world situations, and getting that experience now!). My research lead me to some interesting fields and to two websites in particular:

http://www.emailstatcenter.com/SubjectLines.html
http://www.mailchimp.com/

Both are established in email marketing and metrics and thought these would be ideal clients to approach!

Getting back to the initial point I sent them an email outlining who I was, my project, my research into data visualisation and how it can benefit companies, drive traffic and engage users, my intentions and examples of my findings to date.

Haha, ok this is amazing, I have just received an email from the Co-Founder of the company who drives MailChimp as posted below:

“Anything nerdy, scientific, and visual. I’m all for it.
Let me know what you need. Plan ahead because it’ll take lots of pestering—we’re swamped, but we do want to help. I’m not sure if we posted it, but I do believe we have 2008 data as well.
Call me, or Mark with anything you need to get it done. We’re both co-founders here.
And yes, we’d post it on our site, and blog, and email newsletters. Make it look really, really cool.”

I am pretty excited about this now and can’t wait to get started!