projects
These are my final visualization pieces that mine my Gmail archive to show the top people I’ve sent the most email to each year from 2004 to 2010. I created both a print piece and an interactive piece with the same data but with quite different outcomes. For the print piece, 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). For the interactive piece, I represented each individual in the archive both as a name that fades in and out based on frequency of emails and an individual silhouette which walks closer to the camera as correspondence frequency increases and turns around to walk way when frequency decreases.
Here is a sample video from one of my more recent explorations into email visualization. The grid comes from day-hour based information which is additionally displayed as simple bar graphs when you load up the program. Then after a key press, you can enter the email city scape and visit individual messages… each message makes up a single cube and the opacity of the cube is determined by an algorithm loosely based off the work of Judith Donath and Fernanda Viegas at MIT’s Sociable Media Lab. Brighter cubes show a more “important” email.
Coming back from my week-long email vacation last year, I realized I had not missed anything important and that checking my email once a week would probably suffice. To that end, I started thinking about email as a weekly publication instead of an always on application. I took all of my emails from that week of December 1, 2009 through December 7, 2009, organized them and laid them out as a set of magazines.
This piece involves moving an emergent function of email—task management—out of the inbox and into a physical object external to the computer. Drawing on the ideas of ubiquitous computing, this project focuses on combining an existing behavior, starring items in an inbox, with a familiar metaphor, the desktop plant.By endowing an everyday object with computing intelligence, this prototype tests the theory that moving seamlessly from the periphery to the center of attention eases technological overload.
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Hello! My name is Amy Martin and I am an MFA Design student. Re: Fwd: Email is my thesis project. I've worked as a graphic designer, web developer and webmaster but I am happiest when whatever I'm doing combines aesthetics, communication, science and technology. Here is my portfolio site.
