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

The transparent window or shaped window was supposedly not easy to do. I found that by tweaking in the awt of Java it worked kind of as I would like it to do. On Windows XP. NOT on MacOSX. Also the shaped window which is demonstrated here. If labbed with some more you should find that you could do pretty much all you want to do, by tweaking the shaped window or tweaking the setOpaque or setOpacity which is two different things. Depending on what you want to do and depending on platform.

Note! This code does not work on MacOSX. Due to different Java implementations I guess. AND it’s hackish. No exception handling and there is alot of stuff that can go wrong I guess.

UPDATE! December 10 209, the java implementation was updated on MacOSX 10.6, to the current version available on windows. Nice and all, but the problem persists. Hmm. AWT? Workaround on the mac?

Read more on the subject right here:
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/GUI/translucent_shaped_windows/#…

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/misc/trans_shaped_windows.html

Heres the code I got working on Windows XP:

import com.sun.awt.AWTUtilities;
import  java.awt.GraphicsDevice.*; // PC only
import java.awt.Shape;
import java.awt.geom.*;
import javax.swing.*;

public void init(){
// to make a frame not displayable, you can
// use frame.removeNotify()

frame.removeNotify();
frame.setUndecorated(true);

// addNotify, here i am not sure if you have
// to add notify again.
//  frame.addNotify();
// frame.removeNotify();
super.init();
}

void setup() {
size(200, 200);
noStroke();
frame.setAlwaysOnTop(true); // Alltid på topp
frame.setLocation(0,0);
AWTUtilities.setWindowOpaque(frame, false);
AWTUtilities.setWindowOpacity(frame, 0.9f);

Shape shape = null;
//shape = new Ellipse2D.Float(0, 0, frame.getWidth(), frame.getHeight());
//shape = new Ellipse2D.Float(0, 0, 200, 200);
//  shape = new RoundRectangle2D.Float(0, 0, 200, 200, 20, 20);
//shape = new Polygon(int[] xpoints, int[] ypoints, int npoints) ;
int[] myXes = new int[4];
myXes[0]=0;
myXes[1]=150;
myXes[2]=150;
myXes[3]=0;
int[] myYs = new int[4];
myYs[0]=0;
myYs[1]=20;
myYs[2]=180;
myYs[3]=0;
shape = new Polygon(myXes, myYs, 4) ;
AWTUtilities.setWindowShape(frame, shape);

}

void draw() {
setBackground(new Color(0,0,0,255)); // should work with normal background(255) command
//  frame.setVisible(true);

fill(255, 0, 0, 255); // the alpha is not in play at this point – but it come into play when doing per-pixel translucency
rect(23, 23, 54, 54);
}

Yes, Flash on the Beach 2009, and no its not just Flash developers. It was problably awesome. Sheesh, why can’t people tell me about these kinds of events a little bit sooner

Just as a lot of innovative visualisations are coming from the newly arised social networking theme of the web, we are just beginning to look at visualisations for the enterprise. The visual status of the information an enterprise consists of is not really taken seriously considering the amount of money there is to save if you got your information right. Spending some time and some serious money you can actually see what your enterprise looks like. This is not as obvious nowadays as it might seem when enterprises are becoming more and more virtual.

Since a lot of enterprises are turning more and more virtual (like outsourcing of both physical and knowledge processes like IT or production and sourcing) there is an increased demand for what you can actually see and understand. A factory of traditional means is physical and can be visited and inspected and thereby easily improved from what you see in regards of both machinery and processes. These “factories” are no more a part of the traditional enterprise in the industrialized part of the world, but the urge to actually go into the factory and see what’s going on and improve processes and machinery, is still there.
This is why we need the ability to create and edit business logics and invent ground breaking visualisations. Perhaps even augmented reality in the long run.

Many “social-networking-classics” visualisation techniques with nodes and edges in different colours could and should be used where it has its place, but the difference is that we are not applying these visualisation techniques on the social networking field of information, but on the actual enterprise and the business logic. Some new visualisation techniques will have to be produced as well. A little paraphrasing on WYSIWYG would be WYSIWYCI (What you see is what you can improve).

What we can see and feel, we can understand and improve. This is one of the keys for any enterprise that wants to survive in the future.

By the way, how DO you improve something invisible?

Co-author Ulf Jensen

Visualising the complete enterprise is not done in an afternoon. One of the key parts of being able to do it at all is having a common point of reference. A common point to refer everything back to. If every piece of information in an enterprise is constantly changing, including values and market behaviour, you need to have one place to actually feel solid ground. Ground that doesn’t move. You have to stand somewhere when you are looking out into the vast space of the information that a global enterprise consists of. Preferably you need to be in the middle of everything to be able to see what’s going on around you, since everything is moving and constantly changing. Very much like a living organism. This solid ground is what we name the common point of reference. Every piece of information has its anchor back to this point.

Having this common point of reference makes the visualisation actually achievable. This common point is not a bunch of servers making up the master data, we would still be confused and have enormous difficulties sorting out what’s what if this would be the case. The common point of reference is one of the most critical parts of an enterprise information management capabilites and in the extension of this the enterprises actual ability to improve and evolve in a controlled way. And critical to be able to produce a visualisation of the data fusion showing the enterprises actual and possible state.

Thought I’d post this little hack. I picked up the Terzidis book Algorithms for Visual Design (using Processing) and found a version of my own little 3D picking hack and thought that my hack might be ok. I never saw this as anything but a quick hack, but it has helped me alot, still does. I thought that it hopefully could help some people having difficulties solving the picking problem the “real” (and hard) way. It would have helped me.
Heres the code:

Originally posted December 13

Since a couple of days before vacation started last summer, alot has happened. At that time I had a rough sketch of the structure with nodes displayed in 3D, made with processing. I’m still sketching in processing for implementation in the bigger project if the experiment/sketch worked as intended.

Since then we made a larger transition of the codebase to the Evolver project and named it Lucid. Lucid is the word for dreaming while being awake. I had to grab the real java book and catch up on some javaprogramming. Small steps were taken in the javaenvironment. But enough to make some serious test with the geography. Also the biggest step was to check how it worked with Evolver. It does a fine job even if the speed in the 3D-rendering could be better. A closer look at JMonkeyEngine perhaps?

Some research as to decisionmaking was also made. How could we use our excellent model to present things and deliver recommended actions on areas that has never been done before? Especially from one and the same interface. A lot of interesting formations were made prior to that moment this summer. I have to remember those in the future, they might contain some good stuff for later situations.

There was also a wanted entrance to the information as a whole, by entering the information either by what you want to do, or by some sort of strategic tool that would be relevant for top management. Tests were made and some aha-revelations occured.

I realise now that we have come a long way from that initial feeling of wanting to show the structure. I clearly see that we can not only show the structure, we can show knowledge, relations, comprehension and thereby deliver something really unique. How is the big question right now. What does it look like? How many parts of this thing are there? Infinte? Should we make modules? Like the Geography part? But I found that we now have some rails to hang on to when we enter this mass of questions and wanted answers.

Tools

Data Visualisation, Scientific Visualisation and Information Visualisation. They all have to play their part in this grand scheme I think. Which one will work the hardest is yet to decide. Data visualisation was introduced just last week. Prior to that we had nothing in this field which tells me how far we have left to go or run. I know that uttering these vastly separate disciplines in the same sentence might make some people frown and perhaps they are right. This is information visualisation. Not scientific. Yet I cannot think of all the things we want to show without using the strengths from all these disciplines to convey the information and knowledge we need. Perhaps… Oh nevermind.

Perspectives

Custom perspective
The different perspectives derived from the Balaced scorecard could be called ”custom perspectives” and there is also the information perspectives.

Information perspectives
Search/find focus – Focusing on the ability to find a specific piece of information. (What location does headquarters have?) Structure focus – Focusing on the structure of information, relations and other types of connections. (What does an organisation consist of?) Result focus – Focusing on displaying the result of structures and data. (How much did we sell last month? What capabilities does an organisation have?) Comprehension focus – Focusing on the knowledge and the overall understanding of a given situation. (How does the organisation work/function?) Consequence focus – Focusing on the consequences of the result derived from specific structure. Given specific results – rule-based consequences could suggest recommended actions. (Is last months result good or bad? Is my current organisation optimal given my wanted result?)

These different perspectives married with the different tools really help sorting out whats what and purpose driven visuals. At least up until we can see what kind of limits they have. We need some serious competence to guide us through all this.

Highlights from fall 2008

- The proof of the technology in late May 2008. It was a good day when I saw those wiggly edges that was ending up in nodes that actually came from Evolver. So nice.
- The map of the world. September 2008. I resisted too long to put a geographical map in the demo, since I thought it to be too simple. Now it is the champion for the whole thing since it is so easy to understand and relate to.
- The structuring of theories involved. September 2008. The presentation ”Visualisation Basics” was really nice to further communicate this project internally.
- The *Big-company-name-here* presentation. November 2008. To work with Eero, Karin & Jan on this was fantastic. It made me jump several steps further than I thought I could.
- The LU lecture. December 2008. The lecture at Lund University forced me to structure theories and the work I had done. Something, or rather alot is still missing or is incoherent (which is the only thing that makes me nervous at presentation time – I really hate that) and realising that made me able to jump another four steps in my head.

Summing up 2008

So the summary would be, I have had far too little time to devote to this. My planned time is 50% of my total number of hours but the reality is perhaps 20%. And the structure and plan for this has to become much more rigorous. It really has to be split into different categories of problems to be well structured. And then prioritised. The fall has been spent quite good now in looking back, since alot of iterations has to be made in alot of different categories of problems. The guestlecture on Lund University really made alot come alive and forced to be presentable and understandable. This was a very good thing since I realised alot of things during this time. Like the power of it. And like the entrance. What on earth should the entrance to this information be like? What would be seen when entered? What does the complete enterprise really look like? Is it a double helix lookalike? What could we learn from that picture if so be it? Anything, but a cool unique image?

I think the mode of zooming in and out in different information areas could be interesting from a knowledge perspective. Having several information areas compared, zooming in and out on the details and comparing patterns, perhaps time differentiated, with each other could be a way of ”analysing” or getting a feel for the information in there. Getting a feel is not to be taken lightly. Sometimes you could actually have a sense of where you find things even if you don’t really know for certain, but it gives you a starting point.

And why are we doing this?
Well, we don’t just want to look at the structure like I thought initially. We want to get hard core knowledge from this. We want to have consequences presented to us. We want to comprehend how the enterprise really works and functions. What is loose ends in the enterprise and why are they still loose? What is not on target in the enterprise and what is? We want to see the current state and lab with the future state of the enterprise. We want to fully understand the nature of the complete enterprise and thus allow for decisions to be made based on facts rather than instinct or complacency. That’s why.