Design Ecology

Cartagen is a set of tools for mapping, enabling users to view and configure live streams of geographic data in a dynamic, personally relevant way. Today's mapping software is largely based on static data sets, and neither incorporates the time dimension in its display nor provides for real-time data streams. Cartagen, built in HTML5, and viewable on mobile devices such as the iPhone and Android platforms, helps users to analyze and view shared geodata from multiple sources. Cartagen is a dynamic map renderer which employs Geographic Style Sheets (GSS), a cascading stylesheet specification for geospatial information—a decision which leverages literacy in CSS to make map styling more accessible. However, GSS is a scripting language as well, making Cartagen an ideal framework for mapping dynamic data. Applications include mapping real-time air pollution, citizen reporting, and disaster response.

Today's digital typography is more or less based on the format defined by movable type, with only a few parametric innovations. It has gone a long way, and surmounted many obstacles, to have similar visual features as printed type. At the same time, people are writing less by hand, and the ancient art of handwriting—which was used and necessary to express many personal attributes—is dying. We are exploring ways to keep written, personal expression a part of our digital life, as well as methods for our personal communication to continue to inherently express our personality, status, and current emotions. For example, in our digital lives, what will a signature look like, or a quickly scribbled love note? We are working with a new typographic format and experimenting with input devices inherent to human expression, such as gesture, voice, and body motion, to address these questions.

Cartagen SMS is a data-reporting system for geographic information. It allows anyone with a cell phone to create map data without a GPS. Leveraging the user base of four billion mobile phones worldwide, Cartagen SMS allows anyone with a mobile phone to report real-time geographic information.

Even the most open content system is only as transparent as its interface. Taking cues from the timeless activity of annotating the margins of books, Marginalia provides a visual overlay for analyzing Wikipedia articles. Employing a number of different visualizations, users can browse Wikipedia with a critical eye for who authored each section, how contentious an article or topic is, or the geographic diversity of the authors. Marginalia pulls back the curtains on the collaborative authorship process, and has broader applications in the critical reading of online works.

One of the major barriers designers and artists encounter when programming digital media is the difficulty of translating mental models of interactive creations into a format and language that can be interpreted by computers. This problem arises because current software development environments demand a sequential format for code. In contrast, today's digital media is characterized by dynamism and interactivity, and creative individuals conceptualize these computational processes with a wide variety of mental models. MIDE proposes a new interface for visualizing, editing, and manipulating code. It seeks to enable a user-defined, conceptual, visiospatial representation of computation that complements the traditional text-based perspective; by maintaining continuous relationships between the two, it allows users to navigate code in multiple perspectives synchronously. Further, MIDE allows fluid transitions between different modes of computational representation and different levels of representational detail by enabling zooming and information abstraction mechanisms.

Newsflow is a dynamic, real-time map of news reporting that displays both the latest top stories as well as the news organizations which covered them. All articles are from the last few minutes. Viewing news in this way lets us see how the choice of 'top stories' by news bureaus is geographically unequal, or rather, what areas of the world are neglected by various national news sources. Built with HTML5 on the dynamic mapping framework Cartagen, Newsflow draws on real-time data from over 200 news organizations as well as Google, Yahoo, and other sources. The ability to view such data in real time offers viewers a chance to see how news editors shape national attention as stories unfold.

Polybody is a participatory public installation that was exhibited as a part of the Media Lab show at Ars Electronica 2009 in Linz, Austria. The installation is a digital embodiment of the virtual and real-world events in which it is situated. Visitors, who may share the physical space or only a connection through the Web, collaboratively produce a collage from real-time Web images. This is projected upon a paper sculpture—a human figure in relief. As the collage is continuously remade, the relief generates printed postcards capturing the unique intersection of people, moment, digital presence, and physical space. We invite visitors to take these small paper tokens with them when they leave the exhibition, as a record of their experience to share with others.