Shopping, relationships, education, war, business deliveries, maps, politics, society, advertising, linked data.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7963311/10-ways-data-is-changing-how-we-live.html

OOM Creative is excited to part of the Creating Liveable Cities exhibition – as part of the 2010 State of Design festival – sponsored by Melbourne Water. Four innovative design teams Buro North Room 11 I-N-D-J & OOM Creative were invited to develop design responses to the theme of water as a resource within our urban environments.

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.

The image above on the left shows the realtime screen & print installation, with a close up of the screen graphics on the right. Photo © Tobias Titz

Visualisations: Greg More, OOM Creative
Sound design: Marco Cher-Gibard

Images below: 10 posters illustrating a decade of water data; print from exhibition showing data from 2009; detail of print.

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.

ARUP SLP Info Visuals from OOM CREATIVE on Vimeo

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.

OOM Creative also created a series of short films to document the art works that are viewable on the National Portrait Gallery YouTube Site

Here is an in depth article article about the exhibition:
http://www.metaversejournal.com/2010/01/21/national-portrait-gallery-in-second-life/

Design Article:
Australian Design Review

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

Byron Reeves – fbFund REV, 7/31/09 – Part 1 of 2 (Version 2), “Work Sucks – Games are great” from fbFund REV on Vimeo.

I particularly liked the diagram of the Inside-Out Process, where internal projects of a company are moved outside the company walls to the most sensible strategic destination. I think this diagram aids in understanding how OOM CREATIVE connects with a client’s project. We advance research and development through the design and development of digital environments ranging from information visualisations through to virtual environments. The expertise and skills of digital environments aren’t necessarily core to a company’s business, but when engaged, can be an important part in the communication, understanding and development of an innovation strategy.

Link to article

(Image source: HBR Dec 2008, How Open Innovation Can Help You Cope in Lean Times, p71)

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.

Official NPG Doppelganger Website
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