Karsten Schmidt and Sascha Pohflepp's Social Collider.

Data is forever. It's a fact that we often gloss over in our "always on" digital world, where we tweet our every move, Facebook all our friends and make ourselves easily locatable just by turning on our mobiles. This behavior leaves a permanent digital data trail, yet we continue to make the Hansel and Gretel mistake of not looking back to see if this trail could actually lead back home.

Designers working in the field of data visualisation recognize the importance of these trails. To them, visually representing data can be every bit as weighty as the emphasis we put on tracking carbon footprints. If environmental stresses mean that we should capture an overarching snapshot from these footprints, then the stresses of our digital age - with its information overload - require that we create an umbrella view of it too. While the first helps to us measure our impact on the environment, the latter helps us to understand our place within it.

There's also a corollary between data vizualization's ability to capture the human zeitgeist and advertising's aspirations to influence it. Data viz hits many of the touch points that influence ad makers' desire to speak "with" rather than "at" people: it understands behavior, fosters engagement, emphasizes collective sensemaking and encourages dissemination while creating an immersive, aesthetic experience for its viewer.

Karsten Schmidt is a computational designer and founder of UK-based design studio PostSpectacular. He's collaborated with fellow design studio Universal Everything on the generative video-wall installation, Forever, for the Victoria & Albert Museum along with a host of individual exhibitions, writings and workshops, including a three-day "Data Visualization & Processing" workshop for CADA, Lisboa in April.

As part of Google's Chrome Experiments series, Schimdt created Social Collider with artist/designer Sascha Pohflepp. Collider aims to create a macroscopic picture of Twitter by visualizing the cross-connections between the myriad conversations that occur on the social messaging site. In doing so, the creation of memes and how they're spread are revealed with the ultimate aim of catching the zeitgeist in action.

Social Collider aims to capture the zeitgeist.

"Instead of just looking at fixed data sets from statistics institutes, the really interesting projects in data visualization come when people are able to use their own data and apply it to their own context," explains Schmidt. "From the behavior changing point of view, data vizualization can be hugely powerful. If you're able to collect every detail of your daily rhythm: how many times you go to the toilet, how many cups of coffee you have, how much money you spend everyday. If you had a way to interlate all this data, you will learn a lot about yourself."

Schmidt is pointing toward a democratization of data visualization. One that gives individuals the ability to wrestle their data away from institutions and empowers them to build their own narratives and make their own interpretations. In other words, from being handed the message to actively creating it.

Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of IBM's Visual Communication Lab center their research on this idea of bringing social collaboration to data visualization. Many Eyes, created by the VCL team, is a collection of data visualizations created by everyday people. The site invites users to upload data, whether personal or public, create interactive visualizations and, via an imbedding function, disseminate them as a means of fostering conversation.

"Information visualization is something that has traditionally been a very solitary activity. Something that only experts would do," says Viegas. "But visualization is very powerful in turning lots of numbers into pictures that people can look at and immediately get things like trends and interesting clusters of numbers and so forth."

"We're interested in the idea that visualizations can tap into the world's collective intelligence," continues Wattenberg. "We view it as a way to make people smarter, and when you add in the ability of groups to think together, it can become this amazing multiplier for the world's IQ."

The key to tapping into this collective sensemaking is in the aesthetic quality of data visualizations. What Schmidt, Viegas and Wattenberg all have in common is that they've exhibited their work in major art institutions from the Museum of Modern Art to the London Institute of Contemporary Arts. For all its functional qualities, data visualizations can also be artworks. And in the same vein as art, it aspires to take huge amounts of information and present it in a way that encourages viewers to gain instant insights by grasping its meaning wholly and intuitively.

"When you bring in the social context, the aesthetics can make a huge difference. If I create a graph, for example, and it looks beautiful I'm much more likely to show it around to other people," Watternberg explains simply. "The aesthetics can create a level of social engagement and get people to pay attention and look for a longer time. It's going to spark more insight. Visualization is a great example of where the aesthetics directly impact the function of the object."

When Dan Goods, visual strategist for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Nik Hafermass, founder of LA-based design studio UbERSEE, and Aaron Koblin - a data vizualization artist in Google's technology department, who helped launch the Chrome Experiments - pitched their eCloud installation to the City of San Jose Public Art Program, they were required to pitch themselves as artists first, credentials second.

eCloud is a 108-foot suspended sculpture that will be installed at the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport toward the end of the year. Like all data visualization pieces it is generative. It visualizes weather data changes that are taken from a live feed of weather and wind conditions for all US airports, provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A mock-up of eCloud.

That data is fed to a server which then sends out information to the 100 circuit boards that control the electrically switchable plexiglass panels that the structure is made from. These panels have the ability to change opacity with the transmission of an electrical charge, from opaque to transparent. When the data is fed through the structure, abstract images move from one panel to the next - similar to the way pixels perform - creating a visualization that mimics the movement of a cloud.

Accompanying display signage will communicate the data set to viewers, but the experience is largely meant to be an aesthetic one. One that addresses a concern that Schmidt has about data visualization's potential to break free from the node-line-node design pattern that has a stranglehold on the majority of projects. If data visualizations are meant to engage, the idea is that they can afford more dynamic uses of metaphor, which is the term used for the actual visual representation of the data.

"The great potential of the piece is that we are working with something that is extremely ephemeral and open to interpretation as clouds are," says Hafermass of the cloud metaphor. "The childlike wonderment when you look up at the clouds and you see a specific shape for a while and you try to interpret what that might be, that's the poetic quality of the cloud. It also symbolizes weather in constant transition as it's actually fed by weather data."

In an environment like the airport, where travellers are in a situation of sensory overload and the fascination of flying has long disappeared, Hafermass and Woods say that eCloud is an attempt to capture people's attention, to slow them down for a second and immerse them in an interpretive experience. As the digital age move forward, the amount of information that we're bombarded with will similary increase. Attentions will continue to fragment, and new systems such as data visualization will be needed to focus those attentions by creating coherent messages that truly engage.

"The whole visualization field is becoming necessary simply to cut out the noise," sums up Schmidt. "If you look at an image which has been created generatively, it already takes into account a lot of filtering for you, which you really need to do. It just helps you to cut down the noise level and improve the signal."

www.postspectacular.com
www.many-eyes.com
www.uebersee.us/projects/ecloud