Design statement:
OOM Creative’s challenge was to present 10 years of data from Melbourne’s water systems in an elegant and memorable information visualisation. We were interested in how the data could tell a story over time – and through some early prototypes – discovered that placing the water data in circular formations generated intriguing and informative shapes; working both as graphics and animations. Each day of the year is arranged clockwise around a circle, and then the values for rain fall, reservoir storage, river level and sewerage are plotted on these days. Immediately you see how the seasons shape our water supply, the amount of variation there is in a decade, and how our behavioural patterns effect the water output from the city. As designers we’re interested in how people take away their own readings of the graphics, by understanding a decade of information, a year, or simply a day in the life of Melbourne’s water systems.
OOM Creative developed a realtime HD screen & print installation, and 10 large poster designs (2.3X1.6 M) on show in Melbourne’s City Square during the festival.
We have recently been working with ARUP – Digital Innovation on a range of visualisations. As one of OOM Creative’s design services we add value to client data by translating large and complex datasets into interactive and informative visualisations. In this project we worked with ARUP to translate email, file and project billable hours into an interactive presentation entitled – The Secret Live of Projects. The project illustrates the relationships between human and digital activity by visualising the digital shadow (files, emails etc) of a project as it unfolds over time.
One of the most interesting visualisations to come from the project plots an email archive over time as shown in the video above. It’s a unique piece of visualisation that grows an email network purely from tracing who first introduces another recipient into the email network. The visualisation also shows:
- the different locations of the people through color (blue = city 1, yellow = city 2, grey = NA)
- the billable hours for the project for each person through the size of the node
- who is sending and receiving emails, through the pulsing and decay of the nodes, and if not part of the email conversation the node fades over time.
Other visualisations in the presentation included the a matrix of email senders aligned to cost centres, and a stack visualisation of the 10000 files used in the project.
OOM Creative have recently completed a visualisation project for the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, which uses data collected from the Second Life Portrait Island Sim, to provide insights into how and when visitors were inhabiting the space of the exhibition.
With over 48,000 points of information collected through the great Maya Realities metrics service, OOM Creative took the raw data and generated visuals to enable the exhibition curator to present the success of the exhibition; weekly/daily visitor numbers, return visitors, accumulation of visitor time, number of artworks visited etc. From these we can report that the average visitor to Portrait Island would spend around 25 minutes in the exhibition space, and generally visit all 5 artworks of the exhibition in that time. We can also correlate from the visualizations that a shared experience of the exhibition (eg people visiting at the same time) increases the length of a visitor’s stay.
The image above illustrates three of the interactive visuals:
Left. avatar matrix – each coloured dot is an avatar on sequential days – with lines indicating return visits
Middle. drill down examination of weekly and daily data – showing visitor numbers, time spent, and lines indicate proximity between avatars. (Names blurred for privacy)
Right. 3d point cloud (heatmap) of the data collection – showing literally all the points in space the avatars inhabited at minute intervals.
The image below illustrates the design of the user interface for the metrics. Each visualization can be accessed and interacted with separately, through a standalone application developed using the cross platform Adobe Air system (PC/MAC/Linux). Dynamo Zanetti is one of our design team avatars – so you can see as the designers of Portrait Island – we’re there quite a lot.
Click here to interact with a small sample of weekly data for the project. These web based interactive visualizations show who was there, for how long, and who they came in proximity with (the social network of Second Life). There is also a 3D heatmap showing the positional data of the avatars (blue dots mean underwater). Please note each avatar has been given an anonymous name for privacy, and the data has been altered and reduced from the actual recorded Second Life activity.
Over 250 people came to the National Portrait Gallery for the launch party of the Doppelgänger exhibition. Portrait Island is now live! If you’ve visited Portrait Island, we’d loved hear your feedback about the project via the comments section below, or use the official ‘feedback’ survey accessible on the Island.
If you haven’t tried Second Life, it’s an easy to install and runs on most computer systems. Visit the project in Second Life, here is the SLURL, or the Doppelgänger Website
OOM Creative designed Portrait Island for the National Portrait Gallery as a virtual online exhibition space. Doppelgänger is the first exhibition to be showcased on the island, and the island is seen as a long term – virtual extension – of the Portrait Gallery’s physical spaces, for digital art works that engage issues of identity.
“Upon landing at the National Portrait Gallery’s Doppleganger Island, I was immediately struck by the design of the space – Greg More has created an environment reminiscent of London’s Tate Modern, austere but not cold, monumental but not alienating – a perfect canvas for the range of virtual portraits that the exhibition comprises.” Kate Richards, Multi-media Artist and Producer.
IMAGES: View of Portrait Island – foreground Autoscopia by Adam Nash, Chris Dodds, Justin Clemens | Installation for Cao Fei’s iMirror films | Detail of Portrait Island forum space
OOM Creative is all go in 2010 and working with a range of great clients on innovative projects: from data visulisations to virtual environments. 2010 brings the launch of the ACVA Lab workshop in February and a major event on Portrait Island in March. Above is a snapshot some of OOM Creative’s recent project work.
We are busy designing and building Portrait Island with 5 teams of artists for the Doppelganger exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Portrait Island is a Second Life environment that will open to the public on the 24th October. We’ll post again when the space goes live, but until then, below is postcard – a visual sampler – of some of the details from Portrait design.
OOM Creative is part of the team developing strategies, workshops and prototypes, for the next generation of artists working within virtual environments. This is The Australia Centre of Virtual Art LAB (ACVA LAB) an innovative project funded by the The Australia Council for the Arts that runs through to March 2010.
The Australia Centre of Virtual Art Lab (ACVA LAB) is a forward thinking initiative to promote the pioneering work of Australian artists using virtual world platforms. ACVA LAB will advance the development of artistic networks, prototypes and exchange with its central questions: “What could a virtual art lab be if it was imagined by artists for artists?”
The project team comprises of Chris Dodds Icon.Inc, Adam Nash and Greg More OOM Creative – three of Australia’s most recognised virtual art and architecture experts. http://www.acva.net.au/
OOM Creative is excited to be working with the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, on a forthcoming exhibition Doppelgänger. Curated by Gillian Raymond the exhibition will feature international and national artists working in Second Life who have been commissioned to address the themes of identity, self, and new interpretations of portraiture in a virtual environment.
OOM Creative is designing the overall exhibition environment including landscaping and architecture and are looking forward to working with the artists while they are residents in the months leading to the exhibition opening in October 2009. The project will develop in three design phases allowing the nature of the exhibition and its context to develop organically over time. More to come as this project develops. The imagery above shows the design at the end of phase one, and below, the artists on the island. More details and imagery to come as the project develops.
Society is interacting with ever larger scales of information – at new orders of magnitude (OOM) – and we believe that we need to design digital environments that respond to this scale shift. OOM Creative is interested in the synergy between information and space, and how immersive digital environments can provide meaningful contexts for information sharing. How can digital space be syndicated or pushed to audiences? How does one design spaces as contexts for shared experience?
These illustrations present a series of ideas about digital objects and environments. Each coloured element represents a different media channel or information stream.
If one looks closely at the make up or DNA of a media channel one can see that it made from a collection of smaller elements (these could be data, imagery, 3D models etc ).
In the new paradigm of web 3D we can consider 3D digital space as a media channel, which provides a great context to experience other elements from a range of information channels, be it in a platformed or structured space,
or to be experienced in an informational landscape.
OOM Creative is advancing the role of design in these emerging hybrid environments that utilise digital space as a new context for sharing information.
If these ideas are of interest to a project you are developing, your R&D team or business, you can send us a message through the comments form below (remains private), or just drop us a line at info [at] oomcreative.com.
Naturally having work featured in – and attending the opening of – the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA was a great highlight. An extraordinary exhibition curated by Paola Antonelli was the spatial equivalent of walking through 5 years of innovative art, design and technology blogs. Visualisation – Not Your Usual Interfaces – the section I had work featured in – has resonated for its focus on how designers are considering different scales of information. Most of the visualisation section was based on order of magnitude problems or opportunities to deal with data sets requiring innovative approaches using visual outcomes. Less about illustrating quantity, more about the qualitative and temporal conditions of information, where aesthetics are a driving factor in telling a story through data and image.
As well as director of OOM CREATIVE, I’m also a lecturer of architecture + design at RMIT University, where I recently curated a show entitled Synthetic Environments. This focused on synthetic environments as contexts for research, design and learning. The exhibition features studios, research projects and workshops utilizing virtual worlds, videogames and realtime digital environments for creative purposes.
| Melbourne, Australia |