Rivers of Southeast Asia

Maps are so ubiquitous that we sometimes ignore the craft involved in clearly presenting this enormous quantity of information. To succeed, maps must clearly describe the data they are presenting, fit it into a surrounding design language, and be readable at a variety of different scales, sizes and presentation modes.

How is a designer to tackle these challenges? What follows is a rundown of a few tools that can make the task of designing, deploying or just visualizing a map a little bit easier.

World Happiness Index (source:Gallup World Poll)

Targetmaps allows you to create and share any kind of datasets in a global- or country-specific map. All you need is an excel spreadsheet with some kind of geo-coded data and the tool does the rest for you. While Targetmaps provides limited control over your map’s overall appearance (the underlying map data is google maps), the pleasure of this site comes from the easy-to-use tools for customizing your data ranges and presentation in order to communicate your data most effectively. In fact, using this tool, we were struck by how easy it is to ‘massage’ the appearance of data to tell a specific story, highlight or diminish a disparity or conceal poor data. We were pleasantly surprised to see that Targetmaps uses our favorite presentation tool prezi for its tutorials. Check out my map of Fixed Line Broadband Subscibers by country!

While the ability to easily put geo-coded data into a map format, it can also be useful to have the ability to customize the look and feel of a map. For this kind of task, two tools stand out.

Cloudmade Map Styles

Cloudmade is a commercial product built on top of the open source openstreetmap project. They offer hosting, APIs and data sources for a fee to developers of locative apps who want to develop, deploy and run maps on devices and websites. If you’re building a commercial mapping app, definitely check them out. However, what drew me to cloudmade was their style editor, an easy-to-use tool that lets you customize the appearance of openstreetmap data hosted on Cloudmade. With it, you can create a low-contrast grayscale graphic map, a street-centric map for navigation, or a nighttime-style map. The editor is fun and easy to use, but unfortunately, unless you are a paying customer, there is no way to share, export, embed, or otherwise make use of the map styles you create with it. It is included here because it’s an interesting example of a commercial mapping tool built on an open source project, and it’s easy and fun to use.

If you find yourself needing more control over your map data, or if visual appearance and flexibility is an important factor, consider an alternative.

TileMill Editor

TileMill

Tilemill is an open source tool developed for use with MapBox, which describes itself as a system that “radically lowers the barrier to entry for making custom base maps and overlays.” They go on to echo our sentiments when they claim that “data analysts can become mapmakers without GIS expertise, and GIS experts can become cartographers without first mastering design.” Our kind of people indeed. Mapbox offers similar hosting services to cloudmade, but in contrast to the Cloudmade editor, I found Tilemill to be a much more useful tool for the map generalist or designer.

Tilemill takes some configuration to set up and run, and it helps to have some knowledge of GIS systems and data formatting to get the most out of it. However, after some initial configuration, you find yourself at the helm of a powerful map-creating and design tool. Not only can you import GIS datasets and overlay them on top of the variety of physical, political and cultural map data that comes bundled with the system, you have complete fine-grained control of the appearance of the maps at various scales, thanks to a CSS-like markup language called Carto.

The really great part about TileMill is that in addition to being able to host maps on Mapbox, you are given complete creative control over your work. You can export any map you make as a vector pdf, raster image or in the MBTiles format (for true GIS folks.) This kind of flexibility and openness could make TileMill a valuable addition to any designer’s toolbox. For a terrific example of the fusion of design and content that’s possible with MapBox, check out this extraordinary site that maps out US drone strikes in Pakistan.

(video, links and observations after the jump.)

Research that aims to explore methods of facilitating group collaborative processes form an entire subset of HCI research, but after watching Pictionaire’s project video, a few features jumped out at me right away. The basic image capture is much like an electronic whiteboard, where users can save and retrieve the contents of a reading surface. However, it’s interesting to see what opportunities open up when the collaboration surface is laid flat and is able to be combined with scanned images or objects.

In my experience in brainstorming or design sessions, oftentimes there is a tactile disconnect between work posted on a wall or corkboard, work on a table and notes or writing on a whiteboard. Pictionaire addresses this disconnect in an interesting way and I would be curious to learn about more specific feedback that the design professionals who were involved in user testing had to say about using the system.

Collaborating on a projected surface and presumably in a darkened environment might pose interesting challenges, I was inspired by the ‘spotlight’ feature shown in the video, and thought it would be interesting to have the capability to create, move around, pinch-zoom and rotate generic white rectangles. These could be used to provide light on printed media or an object, and could also facilitate highlighting specific objects or materials during a session.

The Pictionarie Project Site
has some interesting videos exploring some of formal HCI issues such as the use of contextual interactions.

See Also : BumpTop, Reactable, Microsoft Surface

Scribbles is an ideal addition to any visual designer’s toolkit – it is simple without being simplistic, has features designed to enable creative flow and speed, and generally does a good job at what it claims to do. While I found its control over color a bit frustrating, the layer control and ‘trace’ tool were both features that I can actually see myself using. For a small piece of software like this that relies on demo versions to spur purchases, a handful of features that stick in a user’s mind can mean the difference between an application that is used once out of curiosity and one that is purchased and becomes a valued tool.

With that said, after using Scribbles for an hour or so, the biggest insight I came away with was that it really is designed to be used on a tablet computer, or at least with a tablet input device. First, Scribbles’ tools respond to pressure, which obviously makes use of a tablet ideal. Second and more importantly, without the array of mechanical tools like bezier curves, lassos, masks and all of the other little robot helpers designers use, Scribbles relies on the fine motor abilities of the user’s hand. In fact I feel that the design is revolutionary precisely because it it designed from the ground up with the hand in mind.

MacLife had this to say:

Its bare-bones aesthetic doesn’t come from dumbing down the program’s capabilities, but rather from cleverly removing unnecessary complexity.

Personal Anecdote: A classmate of mine in design school hurt his right hand badly in an accident during the school year. A talented and experienced illustrator, he was distraught that the multiple surgeries and six months of physical therapy would derail his entire semester. One of his professors took it in stride and simply said to him – “well, just use your left hand.” He did, and being the talented individual he was, could soon draw and paint deftly with his left hand, with a looser, more expressive (and IMO more interesting) style.

I suppose this story goes to the heart of the point I am trying to make here, that sometimes removing ‘crutches’ that we use and starting from the ground up allows us to see things and communicate in ways we didn’t even know we could. I look forward to more software that challenges us in this way.

Much has been written about Sketchpad, Sutherland and all of the developments in HCI, computer science and engineering that continue to flow from his work. In the context of this site however, it’s important to note that Sutherland’s innovative engineering solutions were all driven by the desire provide people the ability to express themselves more intuitively with technology. The application precedes the solution.

“A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland.” –Ivan Sutherland.

Like any tool, a whiteboard is only as good as the person who uses it. On the other hand, easy access to space to let ideas fly can be valuable, and there is a lot to be said for ‘breaking the frame’.

IdeaPaint lets you paint a whiteboard anywhere you want it.

via FastCompany

]]> http://www.poxod.cc/blog/2009/12/13/make-an-entire-wall-into-a-whiteboard-with-ideapaint/feed/ 0 http://www.poxod.cc/blog/2007/05/30/scratch/ http://www.poxod.cc/blog/2007/05/30/scratch/#comments Wed, 30 May 2007 17:03:25 +0000 cc http://www.poxod.cc/blog/2007/05/30/scratch/ The Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab has released Scratch, a new graphical programming environment designed to teach fundamental aspects of computer programming in a fun and easy-to-understand way. Kids can create games or stories while learning basic concepts of logic and programming.

The community aspect of Scratch is cool as well – because the environment is java-based, kids can upload their creations to the scratch website and comment on each other’s creations. I’m interested in seeing if the sharing aspect of scratch can elevate to the next level, where kids can complete a series of tutorials in order to learn more advanced capabilities of the system. If the satisfaction of completing a programming challenge was as satisfying as completing a level in a video game, kids’ investment in Scratch might continue beyond the academic user-testing-group and community-outreach testing environment that it no doubt was born in.

Scratch can also be controlled by a custom hardware controller, allowing kids to create projects that are controlled by a slider, button, light sensor or microphone.

Scratch Website
SEE ALSO : Lego Mindstorms NXT

Ping Magazine has a feature on storyboard design. It includes examples of storyboards from Television, Video Game, Commercial and Film projects, along with short interviews with the Art Directors. Good reading!

You can read more about it Here.

Now Sketchup 6 is available, with a raft of new features. Users can now superimpose their creations into photos and match perspective using the Photo Match tool. I have been using Sketchup to pre-visualize media installations, and this tool is an invaluable time-saver. All you need is a few photos of a site and you can superimpose your creation into it.

The other feature that will take up much of your precious noodling-time is the ‘sketchy lines’ capability. In addition to giving users more control over the way lines look in general, you can now alter the stroke of a line and make your model look like a calligraphic painting, a whiteboard sketch or a ball-point pen drawing. Notably missing is the ability to scale the strokes, or create your own. See these instructions if you want to make your own style (it isn’t a trivial task.) Regardless, combined with the ability to set background color and watermark, it’s clear that the Sketchup team has worked hard to make sure that the world doesn’t get inundated with Sketchup renderings that look exactly the same. Long live style!

See Also:
Google Buys At Last Software

ComicLife enables users to create comic strips by simply dragging and dropping their own images onto comic templates, to which they can add captions, titles, speech and thought bubbles. The result is a crisp-looking comic-book layout.

ComicLife’s popularity has exploded, thanks to its ease-of use, integration with iPhoto and other usability features. The software is incredibly easy to use out-of-the-box, but has powerful features which allow a user to customize their creations endlessly. This software isn’t limited to creating family photo albums, it could easily be used to help in the creation of professional storyboards, user scenarios or quick one-off portfolio pages. ComicLife empowers you to quickly assemble a story on paper.

Check out this photostream, where a flickr user used ComicLife to create a media studies textbook/polemic reminiscent of the tract style of Scott McCloud or Quentin Fiore‘s design for the work of Marshall McLuhan, or this page, where a World of Warcraft player narrates his mmorpg adventures.