Aaron Koblin on data visualization

Data visualization artist Aaron Koblin gave a talk at BBH London yesterday which, being in the same building, we were lucky enough to be able to attend. 

Aaron took us through his work, from his student days at UCLA where he worked on projects including the visualization of US flight patterns, to his work at Yahoo! and now Google Creative Labs (I’m sure some of you have seen the collapsing Google page experiments, which can be seen at Chrome Experiments - there are tons more and some of them are a lot of fun to look at, so you should!). A lot of his work, which you can find on his site, uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a platform to channel the participation of thousands of people from across the world, all working in isolation from one another and with very limited knowledge of the projects they were working on. As Aaron mentioned, the interesting thing was to see how crowdsourcing in this manner is a good example of the sum of the parts being more intelligent than the individual parts themselves – a principle expounded on by James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of the Crowds.

Music fans are probably familiar with Aaron’s work for the Radiohead House of Cards video, which used no cameras or lights, but merely manipulated data using a lasers and sensors to capture 3D images. There’s a lot of information on the video, and the video itself, at the Google Code site, including a ‘Making of’ video that explains the process. Watching the House of Cards video in this context made me realise how far technology is really advancing (as with the Toshiba time-sculpture ad), and the seemingly endless things we can do when data and technology come together. 

Data visualization is a subject that really interests us at Made By Many, and it was great to see someone so involved in his craft explain the topic with a range of examples of projects that he’s worked on closely. Aaron’s tips will be useful for anyone who has ever sighed while looking at mundane Excel data sheets, or even creative souls who hit that road block when engaging with data from time to time:

1. Looking at data in different ways completely changes your perspective on it.
2. Use multiple visualization techniques – there is no one best way. 
3. Think about data, not the ‘real world’. 
4. You don’t have to use all the data that you have at your disposal, so don’t feel pressurised to. 
5. Let your data free. The first thing that came to my mind when he said this was Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ album (which was initially available on the web on a pay-as-much-as-you-think-it’s-worth basis), but I suppose that’s more a product than data per se!
6. Work with Radiohead. OK, this was said as a joke but I guess working with someone who is ready to experiment with data, and, as Aaron said, people who are more talented than you always helps your own work. 

Data visualization isn’t only about prettying up otherwise staid-looking numbers. Aaron’s work on the flight patterns made me recall this slide in a presentation by Matt Jones of Dopplr, who said that simply plotting the places members visited resulted in a map that was almost a replica of the world.

And in response to a question asked by someone in the audience, Aaron also said that visualizing day-to-day data, as Nicholas Feltron did with the Feltron Report, can give you a birds’-eye view of your whole life, and in the long run that kind of information is quite useful and interesting to have on a personal level.

We’re only at the beginning of the data visualization revolution.