Huibert van Muilwijk has designed a chair made out of lolly stick-shaped plywood components for Dutch studio Made by Midas. (more…)

It’s a Book, It’s a Stage, It’s a Public Place

They’re in the shelves of Printed Matter in New York as well as at Motto and pro qm in Berlin. You’ll find them at The Book in Seoul and likewise at Jura Books in Sydney: Books with a tiny edition have presence around the globe. Currently, a network of small publishers is in the process of formation, publishing fairly autonomously and increasingly on an international scale. The creative class – independent authors, graphic designers and artists – has discovered the book as its stage of collective knowledge production. New book making stylistics are becoming visible; new forms to interrelate text, image and design. –
The one-day meeting It’s a Book, It’s a Stage, It’s a Public Place understands itself as a nodal point in this international network.

Saturday, March 20, 2010
12:00 – 22:00
Centraltheater, Leipzig

As Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Max Baucus is one of the most instrumental lawmakers in crafting the health care reform that President Barack Obama has promised. In his many years on the committee, Baucus has amassed a wealth of connections to the health care and insurance industries, often through his ties to former staffers turned lobbyists.

The five former Baucus staffers who now lobby for the health care or insurance interests represent twenty-seven different companies or associations. In some cases these lobbyists have the same clients. This map of connections expose how close the many organizations seeking influence on health care reform are to one of the most powerful players in Washington.

All data was taken from OpenSecrets.org.

This new version of Tag Graph for Facebook, by Forrest Oliphant, brings considering improvements in terms of layout and navigation. It's an interesting way of browsing your friends' pictures and knowing in a glimpse with whom you share more photos. Not entirely convinced of the need for the background image on rollover state, but overall it's moving in a good direction.

Santa Monica office Kanner Architects have designed a see-through house overlooking the ocean for Long Island, New York. (more…)

Ride the Byte was developed to make the normally invisible structure of the internet transparent for the general public and allow people to see the path taken by data packages transmitted via the internet. This electronic representation also visualises the flow of information to selected websites in the form of a simulated journey across a virtual reality globe.

The journey begins at the actual site of the installation with a website being called up. This triggers the dispatch of data packages to the geographic destination of the selected website and the relevant server. The ever-changing route of the data packages is charted visually on the surface of the virtual reality globe.

OneDotZero is an international moving image festival, showcasing a variety of work from innovators across the globe. For this year's festival in London, September 9-13, Wieden+Kennedy UK, together with generative artist Karsten Schmidt, were responsible for all the identity and branding efforts. For this purpose, Schmidt authored a generative engine for producing a series of randomized visual systems, which were recorded for use in the trailer and festival posters. The results were astounding.

From the OneDotZero website: "The heart of onedotzero's festival ethos of 'convergence and collaboration' inspired W+K to take advantage of onedotzero's vast fan base and harnessing and bringing together constant, global live conversations from a diverse range of social networking to create the identity. Aggregated words and opinions are channelled via specially created software devised by computation designer Karsten Schmidt. Colourful strands behave organically, gravitating towards invisible paths that will ultimately make the onedotzero logo. A living, breathing identity driven by onedotzero's audience and online community as well as in person at the southbank. A huge projection on the national theatre, lets you interact with the visuals via handset, sms and online message."

You can see Schmidt's flickr set, documenting many of the sketches, prototypes and outputs for the project, or check two videos of the initiative on Vimeo (video 01, video 02).

On September 18th, 2009, New Scientist posted some striking images from the Eurographics Symposium, held in Berlin, which brought together researchers across the globe with new ideas on mapping a diversity of phenomena, from the dive profile of penguins to signature recognition systems.

The one that caught my attention was the visualization of vessel movements, by Niels Willems, Huub van de Wetering, and Jarke J. van Wijk. "The sea seems an open playground, but regulations hold, and furthermore, safety (collision prevention) and security (thread prevention) need to be ensured. Operators monitor the coast using a Maritime Safety and Security (MSS) system, which allows analysis of multiple heterogeneous data sources." elucidate the authors on the problem driving their research.

The goal of the project was to introduce a new visualization method to support operators of coastal surveillance systems and decision making analysts. Using AIS data, the authors mapped the continuous data ships feed to coastguards to show individual traces of each vessel, where darker traces signifiy slower speeds, and colour coding shows the density of traffic in different areas. As the authors explain: "Trajectories are convolved by moving a kernel with the speed of the vessel along the path. We compute the density with both a small and large kernel and show them simultaneously in the shading of a colored height field. The large kernel shows an overview of maritime highways and the small kernel reveals slow moving vessels, which typically occur in zones before the harbour where ships drop anchor."

The images shown here display millions of data points during one week of shipping movement, near Rotterdam, on the Netherlands coast. The first image shows the traffic landscape on a good weather day, in opposition to a more disordered layout when the weather conditions are worse - shown on the second image. You can also read the original paper (pdf).

Spanish architects Carlos Pereda Iglesias and Óscar Pérez Silanes have completed a jewellery shop in Bilbao divided by rippled glass screens. (more…)

I’ve been obsessed with furniture design, specifically chair design, for some time now. My all-time favorite chair designer is none other than the brilliant Hans Wegner. If you’ve never heard of the name, you’ve probably seen one of his classic chairs.

Recently though, I’ve become obsessed with the chair designs of Naoto Fukasawa. Fukasawa is best known for his MUJI CD player, Plus Minus Zero Humidifier, and au/KDDI INFOBAR and Neon phones, all of which are part of MoMA’s permanent collection.

Since 2008, Fukasawa has designed a furniture series for Japanese company Maruni Collection for their Hiroshima line. The collection includes a dinning set and a living set, all constructed with beech and oak wood. The entire line is simply stunning, but what stands out for me are the small dining chairs pictured here. The simple, streamlined design, the mix of sharp and rounded edges and corners, along with the choice of wood make for a beautifully designed chair. Too bad it costs an arm and a leg or I’d fill up my apartment with them.