blog

Several people’s opinions on why nobody used Google Wave.

This is somewhat self-congratulatory but I am so so very glad I protested, argued with and flat out ignored suggestions that my thesis should at all involve a redesign of an email client that attempted to aggregate our myriad ways of communicating with each other.

If I am not vindicated by the academy, at least I am vindicated by reality.

Simple Memory is my final visualization piece that mines my Gmail archive to show the top people I’ve sent the most email to each year from 2004 to 2010. Below is a print piece I created for the exhibition of our final work. I drew simple silhouettes of each person emailed in my archive and lines connect them to the months and years I mailed them the most. Each person and line is also color-coded so we can see over time how my shift in email trends has gone from personal (blue) to professional (orange) and finally to school (yellow). Click the image for a larger version.

The second piece in this series is an interactive piece that shows a more humanized version of the same data. Each individual I emailed the most is represented as a silhouette and that silhouette is color-coded based on my original categorization system. As they walk closer to camera, my frequency of email conversations with them increased, and as they walk away frequency decreases.

In the background you can see the gray shadows of people who I have emailed with but I whom never really connected with in any personal or professional way. I felt it was important to show people AS people instead of lines or numbers or even drawings. I also wanted the animation to demonstrate increasing and decreasing intimacy; the way people move into our lives, come ever closer, and then leave.

This way we can see how my use of email has changed over time. Originally starting with primarily personal messages, my archive moves into work-related messages and finally to school-related messages around the time I started graduate school. By combining metadata with visual representation, we can start to see a cohesive narrative of people moving in and out of my life over the years.

Here are some example sketches that I based my final piece on. Although I was hit rather early with the idea of letting the fourth wall in the piece reflect increasing and decreasing intimacy, I did sketch other types of layouts in addition to my original idea. The bird’s eye view and people as literal, growing bar graphs, however, did not retain the level of visceral impact I was looking for. So I refocused my sketching on the actual interface of the piece.

Although I think most of my explorations are interesting, I don’t think any of them have the depth or emotional resonance that these pieces are starting to tap into. There are plenty of personal data visualization websites out there but they all require you to wear a device and/or manually enter data on a regular basis. I tend to think we can mine the data we are already inputting into our computers every day to find out interesting things about our patterns and our lives in a way that would not be possible without technology. This work doesn’t restrict itself to email in any way, I simply chose email because it has the longest, most stable digital history. Imagine if I was working on my thesis project 8 years ago and I used Friendster… oops.

Anyway, I’ll have more cogent things to say on this topic as I continue documenting my thesis work, but I wanted to add this one first because it’s the last thing I worked on and it’s also my favorite.

Going through decompression, but in the meantime, here is a sample of some of my projects in a short reel.

I’ve spent the last month writing, designing and printing my thesis book, working out the kinks in my presentation and creating pieces for our in-studio exhibition which opened today, actually. While I still need to update the site with documentation both of my research processes and my actual pieces, I thought I would post some teaser bits that will be at the exhibition.

This is the cover of my thesis book. I generated most of the artwork for the cover by wearing a glove that I fitted with flex sensors. I used Processing to keep track of my finger movements as I was designing and laying out the book and when I was finished, I took that data, re-purposed some of my code, and created the imagery for the cover. I had originally thought that if a large portion of my thesis was about metadata then maybe using data created while working on my thesis would be meta-metadata and I found that endlessly amusing. But the cover image isn’t metadata. It’s barely even data at all. But it’s pretty.

I also added in cityscape imagery created in some of my code form studies from my thesis. The movements from my hands, translated into images, both obscure, highlight and create a landscape to surround the forms from my email. Besides, it’s teal and pink which are awesome colors right this moment. And after 9 months of working 12-20 hour days, every day, I thought I deserved something lovely. I also deserve the right to start a few sentences with coordinating conjunctions without feeling oddly guilty.

This is a small version of a 48×36″ poster I created for the exhibition part of our final thesis show. This piece uses data from the last 7 years of my Gmail account. I drew very simple silhouettes of the people I’ve emailed the most over the last seven years and they are listed at the bottom of the poster. A timeline is at the top with lines in between the two showing when I emailed this person the most. It becomes fairly easy to see the general time when I was closest to someone as well as different periods in my own life when I focused on different parts. The colors of the people and the bezier lines correspond to the original categorization system I’ve been using for all of my explorations (this will make more sense in the future if it doesn’t right now). Essentially, blue means personal, orange means work and yellow means school. It is really only within the last few years that I’ve become much more serious about work and school.

Also, I miss the people I used to email about nearly nothing at all. Or I miss being so serious about unserious things. More soon.

I’m giving my thesis presentation at CCA’s Timken Hall. I’ll be discussing the joys of email and talking specifically about a handful of the explorations I’ve done for my thesis project. If I know you/like your work and I could find an address for you, I’ve probably already sent you one of the exciting postcards shown below. If not and you’re not up to anything during the middle of the day, come see me talk big on a moderately sized stage!

Re: Fwd: Email Thesis Talk
Thursday, May 6, 2010, 2:30 – 3 pm
CCA’s Timken Hall

If you’re busy during the day, come chat me up at the thesis reception the night before.

Graduate Design Thesis Reception
Wednesday, May 5, 2010, 6 – 7 pm
CCA’s Grad Design Studios

Both events are at CCA’s San Francisco campus located at:
1111 Eighth Street
San Francisco, CA

back to the top