2008 June Archive at CIID

Archive for June, 2008

Swiss Trains

Published by Dave Chiu
on June 29th, 2008
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If there’s one national stereotype that seems to hold up under scrutiny, it’s that of the Swiss and their timekeeping, particularly when it comes to train schedules.

A nice visualization of real-time train traffic within Switzerland takes advantage of this accuracy.

SwissTrains.ch is currently in alpha, but it is able to show the position of trains along their routes based not on GPS (which will eventually be implemented, according to the introductory blurb on the site) but on the train timetable and an estimate of where the train should be along its route at a given time.

The only (slightly irrational) disappointment is that clicking on the map’s Satellite view does not show the trains moving through the cities and countryside. Yeah, I know, we’re still a few years away from Neal Stephenson’s vision in Snow Crash.

Grime Writing

Published by Dave Chiu
on June 29th, 2008
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, best known as the author of The Little Prince, once said something to the effect of “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.

I can’t help think of this quote in relation with so-called “reverse graffiti” (AKA Grime Writing or Clean Tagging). Unlike traditional graffiti, where a surface is defaced (or some might say improved), reverse graffiti reveals the underlying surface through cleaning, typically by washing. The resulting “refacing” of the surface produces transitory art and confronts viewers with the (dirty) reality of their everyday environment.

If you’ve ever seen a dirty car with “wash me” (or perhaps some other less family-friendly text) scrawled on a window or body panel, you’ve seen a less-refined version of reverse graffiti compared to what the professionals produce:

Of course the interesting dilemma posed to the authorities is whether cleaning the city is a crime. Graffiti certainly is considered a crime, mainly because of its gang affiliation (in the US, up to 80 percent is estimated as gang-related), but graffiti in the form of cleaning would seem to be of benefit to the city.

It’s certainly different from, say, bicycles with dot-matrix printers:

Or 3D sidewalk chalk:

Ultimately, the question remains: is it the medium or the message that’s really the source of conflict between those who would exercise free speech and city officials looking out for the welfare of the public?

Inhabitat has more on the subject of reverse graffiti here and here.

Flight Tracking

Published by Dave Chiu
on June 24th, 2008
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One of the prerequisites for developing interesting data visualizations is good data. An earlier post about visualizing shipping got me thinking about data sources, and I found a nice site called FlightAware which has a ton of information about airports and flights.

Data range from arrival and departure information (available via XML feeds and an API) to current airplane locations and the latest prices for jet fuel at various airports (some digging reveals that SFO charges $7.85 for Jet A while BOS charges $8.63). There’s even a nice Quicktime movie which illustrates a day’s worth of air traffic across the US.

Of course it’s hard to mention flight tracking without bringing up the classic Flight Patterns visualization by Aaron Koblin (the new version of his site is here).

And when talking about planes in general there’s always this amazing composite by Ho-Yeol Ryu, a photographer from South Korea:

Putting Twitter in perspective

Published by Dave Chiu
on June 22nd, 2008
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After the recent earthquake in China, quite a bit of news surrounding the event was communicated via Twitter, even to the point of scooping major news outlets (although one might reasonable contest the quality of that reporting).

Talk at the time revolved around whether Twitter had come into its own. However, as this VentureBeat article points out, we may have been paying attention to the wrong service.

Twitter, after all, is a Web 2.0 startup that’s firmly rooted in the US. But most of the significant events in which Twitter has played a major role in communicating have originated from developing countries. And this is where the article introduces a service which I had never heard of, called SMSGupShup.

SMSGupShup

This service forwards SMS messages sent from your mobile phone to a list of subscribers, providing effectively the same service as Twitter, but through a different medium. Yes, of course Twitter allows you to tweet through your mobile phone, but it’s first and foremost a Ruby on Rails web application (hence all the growing pains).

SMSGupShup, according to the article, has in contrast managed to scale effectively to the point where it now handles 10 million messages a day. Membership has grown from 1 million in January to 7 million in June.

This trend takes advantage of network effects: the fact that there are many more mobile phones in use than personal computers, particularly in developing countries. The article places the ratio in India at 1 computer per 10 phones, and globally the stats are something like 1.3 billion internet users to 3.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions, or approximately 1 billion personal computers to 2.7 million mobile phone users with one phone, and 700 million or so users with two or more phones.

So you can see why the mobile phone as a platform offers an incredible potential for growth, particularly in developing countries. The rest of the article has some interesting points about how the technology is being used to preserve languages (particularly the Hmar language, which has only 65,000 speakers) and to connect groups with similar interests (140,000 followers of the Sikh religion receive daily quotations from their holy book).

The Cloud

Published by Dave Chiu
on June 22nd, 2008
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Looking like something out of Battlestar Galactica (an excellent show, BTW), this video introduces The Cloud, a new research project by the MIT Mobile Experience Lab in collaboration with Pitti Immagine, an Italian fashion trade-show company.

Unveiled in Florence, Italy at the Fortezza da Basso, The Cloud consists of 45 Km of fiber optics stuffed into a 4 meter x 2 meter carbon glass sculpture. Each fiber (out of over 15,000) is individually addressable and, combined with a variety of embedded sensors in the cloud that detect presence, sound, and light, provide a platform for exploration and development of different interactions and experiences with visitors to the site.

Inside Gecko

Published by Dave Chiu
on June 19th, 2008
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No, it’s not an autopsy of a small lizard; rather, it’s a very nice visualization done in Processing that shows how a web browser parses and displays HTML code to the user

It’s kind of like looking under the hood of a car to find out how the engine works…if that engine rendered webpages in milliseconds…

via the Eyebeam reblog

Fighting TB with cell phone minutes

Published by Dave Chiu
on June 18th, 2008
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With their X out TB project, students at MIT have developed a novel approach to encourage tuberculosis patients to take their medicine: free cell phone minutes.

The team’s novel test strip takes advantage of new technology known as paper microfluidics. The strip is embedded with chemicals that react with metabolites present in the urine of patients who have taken TB medicine. When the chemical reaction occurs, the strip changes color, revealing a number.

Patients are given a device that dispenses one strip every 24 hours, and after they successfully take the test, they have about two hours to text the number on the strip to a central database that records that they have taken the drug.

Patients whose compliance rate is high enough receive free cell phone minutes. The team decided on cell phone minutes as an incentive because it’s fairly easy to set up the reward system, and because most of the target patients have a cell phone already.

An incentive program would ordinarily raise the potential for gaming the system (drug users, for example, who get others to provide urine samples when they are tested), but in this case the health issue may help dissuade that sort of behavior. After all, the incentive is in place to improve your health and protect those around you. Plus, the cell phone credits are probably not large enough to justify the effort involved in cheating.

Interestingly, a very similar project came out of MIT a little while earlier, called CellCentives.

CellCentives is a mobile phone-based software. The patient is given a cell phone, and a text message is sent to the phone to remind them to take the pill. When the patient peels back the foil to pop the pill from the package, a code number is revealed. The patient punches the number into the cell phone to signal they’ve taken the pill, and if they comply with the regimen for several weeks, they get free wireless minutes on the phone. Another incentive may include a big prize if they stick to the program for months.

Both projects rely on self-reporting to verify compliance, with the obvious difference being that the first project verifies compliance after the pills have been taken, while the CellCentives project releases the pill and then relies on users to actually take it.

Nothing beats a motivated patient, but as an alternative to direct-observation therapy (DOT), where health-care workers are present to observe the patient taking the medication, both of these projects make innovative use of mobile phones to address critical world health-issues.

Fabric Skin

Published by Dave Chiu
on June 15th, 2008
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The BMW GINA concept car replaces the traditional metal skin of a car with fabric, yielding some imaginative results which have to be seen to be really appreciated:

The outdoor industry has seen a revolution in the last few years in fabric technology, such as RF or ultrasonic welding to produce stitchless seams. The last place I would have expected to see such technology applied is a car, but this concept from BMW just scratches the surface of what may be possible with this approach.

Turning to a completely different medium, Inhabitat posted recently about a Soft House concept by Sheila Kennedy’s firm KVA MATx. Those aren’t ordinary curtains on the house either. They integrate solar cell technology to produce flexible solar panels.

Soft House 1

Soft House 2

Right now the technology to produce these types of solar fabrics is cost prohibitive, but eventually they will come down in price. And thinking about the future development of car and engine technology, it’s not hard to make the leap of connecting solar fabric with electric vehicles.

The use of fabric as a replacement of traditional surface materials (metal, wood, plastic) raises some interesting possibilities for other applications. Cell phones, for example, or computer cases. And in addition to material properties (waterproof, windproof, bulletproof, fire resistant, etc.), fabrics can be lighter than most materials they might replace, so there’s a sustainability angle as well.

Flashback Friday: Sowing Seeds

Published by Dave Chiu
on June 13th, 2008
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A recent post in Inhabitat covered a nice project called BLOOM, a bicycle attachment that spews soap bubbles containing seeds as the rider pedals around town. Taking inspiration from the dandelion, BLOOM uses a vegetable-based soap to disperse the seeds, eventually developing a “green fringe” to sidewalks and roadways as the seeds take root and develop into flowers. This project is interesting both for its practical nature of seed dispersal and the greening of public spaces, and for its whimsical yet pointed commentary on the content of car exhaust.

Bloom

With the spread of bike sharing programs in cities around the world, a bicycle-based system such as BLOOM could conceivably have a measurable impact on a global scale.

The BLOOM project reminded me of the Johnny Apple Sandal proposed by Lift and covered in Metropolis a while back, not the least because BLOOM explicity mentions Johnny Appleseed as an inspiration.

Johnny Apple Sandal

Seeds embedded in the sole of the Johnny Apple Sandal would be released as you walked around and wore out the sandal. Upon sprouting, the seeds would help to clean the soil, and the sandal could be easily taken apart for recycling.

And all this talk about seeds made me think of a nice project called Mobile.Seed by Belmer Negrillo, a graduate of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. His project consists of a mobile phone which has a seed embedded in the plastic case. When the phone is no longer needed or wanted, the user can plant the phone and the seed will sprout.

Belmer’s project fostered a bit of controversy when it was discovered that researchers at the University of Warwick developed (and highly publicized) what was effectively the same idea a year later.

Moodstream

Published by Dave Chiu
on June 10th, 2008
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Moodstream is a very nice leveraging of Getty Image’s digital assets in this tool for building moodboards (and is very reminiscent of WeFeelFine).

You select criteria ranging from “calm” to “lively”, “nostalgic” to “contemporary”, and a series of moving and still images is served up to you along with a soundtrack. Click on the plus sign, and you’ll add the image, clip, or track to your moodboard. Check out the moodboard and click on an asset, and you’re brought to the Getty Image page where you can purchase it.

All in all a rather smooth way of making these digital assets more accessible. Of course, there are lots of other opportunities: What if these images were displayed as part of a screensaver? What if this was running as a background or ambient process, and you could click on images that happened to catch your eye?