So graphs (and its companion graph theory) are apparently the talk of the town. Cool. Graph based databases (neo4j) and other related graph based things are popping up in places where complexity is high and low.

I found graph theory mindtickling a couple of months ago when I read an extremely basic introduction to it while tinkering with AI. The first time I met it was when I started out with Processing. But the AI book was the first time I read that graphs can be anything and everything. As a graphic designer I interpreted that as a solid foundation for creating things while keeping structure intact. A math book I borrowed from a colleague (the book is way over my head) said that “apart from drawing funny pictures it can be used to calculate things in the graph” i.e. the traveling salesman problem etc. I stopped at the funny pictures-part and decided that it was something to look into a bit more. Way too heavy on the math side, but I found via Processing that algorithms are best in practice. Good if they are understood but not a necessity as long as they work (in code) as expected, and if you don’t want them to do something slightly different which I often do. The Anar library for Processing looks good for trying things out even if it focuses a little hard on parametric modeling. I intend to show information, not the architectural structure. So, the struggling to understand continues. I look forward to get it visually controlled as soon as my mind allows me to. But hey, I can always sketch in the meantime.

Graphs and graph theory has been around a long time. So nothing new really. But for a non-math designer, using the graph and its structure gives birth to lot of rules (restrictions) and thus the mind makes new paths and new stuff pops up. I will not be surprised to see a cool information graphic that looks like a flower but is really a graph underneath.

I did this app (Todo Important & Urgent) a year ago for the iPhone. Trying to wrap my head around Objective-C was quite fun. Different way of thinking, but nice to deal with in general even if it got kind of messy at the end when it came to releasing it with provisioning etc. Gah. I realised quite quickly that I would not be doing Processing kind of things in Objective-C. So trying to make a simple kind of app and give it a twist was the choice for me. I think it worked even if the time spent making it hardly makes up for the result (or the money). Still, its visual and shows todo-items in a different way. And of course, it costs lowest-tier. Why else would I even try it out when I got Processing.  And then I found iProcessing. Not Objective-C but a great feeling to see Processing code in Xcode

Great fun discussing and debating visualisations in general and some ongoing projects in particular at MEDEA at Malmö Högskola today. Thanks Jonas for having us at MEDEA. We hoped to see some more people from Tibco and Google but it came out as a great day anyway. Read more about it here.

I just had to make one.

Go get it

New venture at my place of work. I am starting a visualisation department inside Ortelius. An intense personal sales-campaign locally in Sweden for visualisation consulting work has begun. Alot of interest has been shown already and I am happy about the clients that is already in the door. I am strongly looking forward to broaden the visualisation techniques and my own competence regarding customized visualisation. So many problems to solve and so wonderful to get my hands on client specific problems. So far mostly decision support visualisations/clarifications and all is information and data wanting to come alive. Alot of sketching and creative meetings right now. It is going to be a wonderful spring

Great, or not so great for that matter as well, new visualisations that make me wonder and get interested in the data or information lying behind. These things inspire me immensly. Like http://hint.fm/luscious/warm-glow.html. No idea what the use is meant to be, but it gets me thinking, and lures me in to think of the use we could have, like in corporate communications differentiation situations and the thoughts rumble on. http://benfry.com/genomevalence/ is also one of those things you just cannot rub out of your head. No idea how to read it or even begin to approach the information. But completely to die for and inspirational in a fundamentally mindboggling way.

So I guess what really gets me going is the bright new ones with no obvious reason for existing until the user or situation makes the reason appear. Out of nothing.

Just a simple thing as learning it all: http://processing.org/learning/

The wonderful books http://processing.org/learning/books/

The inspirational work of others http://processing.org/exhibition/, http://www.openprocessing.org/, http://www.vimeo.com/tag:processing.org, http://www.youtube.com/group/processing

The endless discussions in this excellent community where even boring problems becomes fascinating http://processing.org/discourse/yabb2/YaBB.pl

Experimental solutions come into light http://processing.org/hacks/

Processing has inspired me more than any other platform so far, apart from typography in general. Processing stands for creativity in the rawest of formats. Amazing, inspirational, mindbending, attention altering and simply wonderful.

Finally we got to see the much talked about exhibition. After a tour round Sweden for invited eyes only and Brussels at the Swedish embassy we (the participating designers/companies) got to see it with our own eyes. The first event took place during the EFAP-conference Crossing Borders – Bridging Gaps in cooperation with Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm, the second event took place during the conference Green Light – Climate change and culture in cooperation with Palladium in Malmö and the the third event, in cooperation with Mirano happened in Brussels. All events was much appreciated. See the whole movie of how the show was done right here. You can also try the whole augmented reality thing right here.

We were proud and happy to contribute with our Visual Enterprise and it was a nice happening at Form&Design Center in Malmö, Sweden. Ulf, our CEO is posing in front of our part in the show in the picture above.

Some words about this project since it is about to come to public attention anyway through a European Union connected exhibition (For the Moment) that is going from Stockholm, Sweden, Malmö, Sweden (for the closing of the swedish chairmanship of EU) and to Mirano, Brussels (swedish embassy). Visual Enterprise is shown in the company of 45 other swedish companies with mainly “designed” products (SonyEricsson, Axis, Källemo, Jonas Lindvall, TRETORN etc) promoting swedish innovation and creativity. Yay!

Project Visual Enterprise purpose

The purpose of the project is to create a visual, interactive visualisation of the complete Enterprise and its business logic. This means to show everything an enterprise consists of, from products, people, organisations to relations and processes and more. We use several different visualisation techniques, some traditional and some more innovative. We aim to show the complete Enterprise to different kinds of users. The user can reside in different organisational levels within the organisation and thus have different needs for information. We are sketching CEO Dashboards as well as views intended for information details for the individual from several perspectives. The Visual Enterprise is detached from the even bigger visualisation concept – the Corporate Command Central which includes hardware and innovative user interfaces.

The Visual Enterprise Project is limited to the visualisation of the Enterprise and its business logic.
The focus is the ability to derive knowledge and comprehension from the visualisation. We want to understand the nature of the complete enterprise and thus allow for decisions to be made based on facts rather than instinct or complacency.

Filling the demand

Demands from the market
The overview of the complete enterprise is missing. There are methods, like a Balanced Scorecard, of controlling an enterprise from  top management in an overview manner, but no means of following the development in the enterprise that reflects the events in reality for the enterprise. The present available informationssystems (Qliktech, SAP, Hyperion etc) and techniques focuses mainly on one kind of information, whether it would be categorised as transaction data, subarea data (GIS, Product portfolio management, performance information etc) for the enterprise. These systems tends to increase the fragmented image of the enterprise, increase complexity in information retrieval and increase the dificulty of comparison of information coming from different systems rather than simplify the intended situation. Our focus would be on the complete picture – in historic, present and future contexts. This in combination with overflow of unstructured information makes swedish industry and corporations vulnarable and limiting the competitive advantages the enterprise possess.

Three main demands:
• Complete picture: multidimensional information, informationstructure, historic data, all information areas – overview and details in conjunction.
• Time: covering past, present and simulating future
• Managing the evolution of the enterprise in realtime

Summary

The long term competitiveness of the swedish (and international) businesses is affected by the capabilitiy of running, maintaining and surveilling todays informationsystems. And in its extension follows the capacity for decisionmaking supplied by the informationsystems.

Visualising the complete enterprise is the only possible way to perceive and digest the enormous amount of critical information, derived from the complete enterprise, needed on a daily basis. The visualisation is aimed for multiple roles in an enterprise. Individual needs for perceiving information is vital and implies multiple visualising techniques of the enterprise’s information.

Download pdf with more images and some details here.

Design is choice.

”What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult–that is, the revelation of complexity.”
Edward R. Tufte