Data Walks - a #climatedata proposal

In response to the UK Met Office's recent data release and Manuel Lima's call for visualisations, there's been a flurry of #climatedata activity in the last couple of days, including some revealing visualisations. Though I'm looking forward to playing with the data myself, this isn't a post about visualisation. It's a simpler proposal for a way to make the data tangible.


Global warming is ultimately a question about change in a single measurement - temperature - over time. One way or another, it can be boiled down to a line graph. How best to make that line tangible? Visualisation is great, but how else could we feel those changes, especially over time? One way would be to walk the data. We could make a kind of giant line graph, in the form of a path or road, then walk from 1850 to 2009. According to the Met Office's graph - remixed above with a picture of my local landscape - this would be a fairly undulating journey, but the last half especially would be a distinct and noticeable climb. Building this path at a walkable scale seems like hard work though. It would be much easier to use the paths we already have. So, here's a recipe for a #climatedata walk:

1. Make a graph. There are all kinds of options here. The Met Office graph shows global difference from a long-term (1961-1990) average. You could for example use local data only, or use raw average temperatures rather than difference from average. You would also need to select a year range from the data - want to walk the whole century or just post-WW2? All the data choices should be made clear to any walkers.
2. Fit to landscape. This is the tricky part. The idea would be to find a walkable route with changes in elevation that fit your line graph well. Finding a perfect fit will be very difficult, but finding an OK fit should be possible. This will involve some scaling questions: how long will the walk be, and how much elevation will it cover? Accessibility, ergonomics, experience design, affect - lots of juicy design decisions here. One crude but easy fitting procedure would be to begin with a route, find its elevation profile, then scale the graph to fit the start and end points of the graph to the route start and end, then note the points where the path and the graph intersect. Maybe some GIS / maps people could help with software tools here for route finding and fitting?
3. Tick marks. Walk the route and mark it out in order to make the whole thing legible. Mark out years or decades, as well as temperature variation (elevation). One option for paths with an imperfect fit, would be to notate the difference between the path and the graph at certain points, as well as points where the path and the graph intersect.
4. Walk. Again you can imagine many ways to do this, ranging from big organised public walks, to smaller private ones. Of course walking often leads to talking - and in a different way to, say, looking at a graph.

I should emphasise that I haven't even tried this, yet, but I hope to - Canberrans, if you're interested in helping organise a walk here, let me know. Wherever you are, if you do try it, let me know - also feel free to adapt / refine / repurpose the procedure. Could be fun, even informative - at the very least, you'll walk up a hill.

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Readings in Digital Design

The Master of Digital Design launched this year with an introductory unit which featured UC alumni Supermanoeuvre, and turned out some great work. Next year it ramps up, with more units and more students - very exciting. I'm currently preparing "Readings in Digital Design", a history and theory unit that presents some key concepts in this nascent, multidisciplinary field (or meta-field). While developing the unit I've also been thinking about how to make the whole course "open" in the broadest sense - accessible, transparent, connective, collaborative. There's a tangle of technical and institutional issues here which I have no single solution to, so in the meantime I'll take a "small pieces loosely joined" approach - this post is the first of those small pieces - the draft reading list at the core of the new unit.

The list attempts to sample the breadth of digital design practices and approaches - so it spans cyberculture, architecture, product design, interaction design, and media art. It also mixes historical sources, academic articles, blog posts and web video, for the same reason, to give a sense of the range of contexts and discourses at work here. With the exception of a couple of firewalled papers (thanks Wiley and ACM), all the sources are freely available online.

Feedback very welcome, as well as additions or gap-plugging - especially on open source in digital design, and tangible / physical computing. Please reuse / remix also, and let me know if you do - call it Creative Commons by-nc-sa.

Readings in Digital Design - Master of Digital Design 2010

Being Digital

• Horswill, Ian. “What is Computation?,” 2007.
• Palfreman, Jon. “Giant Brains.” The Machine that Changed the World. WGBH Boston, 1992.
• Rheingold, Howard. “The First Programmer Was a Lady.” In Tools for thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Pre/Histories of Digital Design

• Kay, Alan. “Personal Dynamic Media.” In The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.
• Ivan Sutherland : Sketchpad Demo (1/2), 2007.
  
• Mark, Earl, Mark Gross, and Gabriela Goldschmidt. “A Perspective on Computer Aided Design after Four Decades.” In eCAADe 2008: education in computer aided architectural design in europe annual conference, 2008.

Networks

• Rheingold, Howard. “Xanadu, Network Culture, and Beyond.” In Tools for thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.
• O'Reilly, Tim. “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” O'Reilly Media, September 30, 2005.
• Burke, Anthony. “Network Paradigms.” In Network Practices, edited by Anthony Burke and Therese Tierney. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.

Open Source

• Raymond, Eric Steven. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000.
• Lessig, Lawrence. “On Free, and the Differences between Culture and Code” presented at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress, Berlin, 2006.
• The Open Art Network

Designing with Data

• “The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More - More is Different.” Wired, June 23, 2008.
• Jones, Matt. “Data as Seductive Material” presented at the Umeå Institute of Design Spring Summit, March 2009.
• Armitage, Tom. “Toiling in the data-mines: what data exploration feels like.” BERG Blog, October 23, 2009.
• Whitelaw, Mitchell. “Art Against Information: Case Studies in Data Practice.” Fibreculture 11 (2009).

Fab!

• Gershenfeld, Neil. "The beckoning promise of personal fabrication," presented at TED, 2007.
• Menges, Achim. “Manufacturing diversity.” Architectural Design 76, no. 2 (2006): 70-77.
• Smith, Greg J. “Means of Production: Fabbing and Digital Art.” Rhizome, March 4, 2009.

Ubiquitous Computing and Urban Informatics

• Weiser, Mark. “The computer for the 21st century.” Scientific American 256, no. 3 (1991): 66–75. Reprinted in IEEE Pervasive Computing, January 2002.
• Hill, Dan. “The street as platform.” City of Sound, February 11, 2008.
• Galloway, Anne. “Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City,” 2003.
• Greenfield, Adam. “All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings.” Boxes and Arrows, December 1, 2004.
• Haque, Usman. “Pachube, Patching the Planet: Interview with Usman Haque.” Interview by Tish Shute, January 28, 2009.

Parametricism and its Discontents

• Schumacher, Patrik. “Parametricism - A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design,” 2008.
• Jacob, Sam. “The Ruins of the Future.” Strange Harvest, December 5, 2008.
• Love, Tim. “Between Mission Statement and Parametric Model.” Design Observer, May 11, 2009.

Tangible and Physical Computing

• Moggridge, Bill. “Multisensory and Multimedia.” In Designing Interactions. The MIT Press, 2007.
• Igoe, Tom. “Physical Computing’s Greatest Hits (and misses).” hello., July 27, 2008.

Biomimicry, Complexity and Self-Organisation

• Weinstock, Michael. “Self-organisation and material constructions.” Architectural Design 76, no. 2 (2006): 34-41.
• Bentley, Peter. “Climbing Through Complexity Ceilings.” In Network Practices, edited by Anthony Burke and Therese Tierney. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.
• Kaplinsky, J. “Biomimicry versus humanism.” Architectural Design 76, no. 1 (2006): 66-71.

Redesigning Design

• Sanders, Elizabeth, and Pieter Jan Stappers. “Co-creation and the new landscapes of design.” CoDesign 4 (March 2008): 5-18.
• Howe, Jeff P. “Is Crowdsourcing Evil? The Design Community Weighs In.” Epicenter | Wired.com, March 10, 2009.

Sustainable Digital?

• Bonanni, Leonardo, Amanda Parkes, and Hiroshi Ishii. “Future craft: how digital media is transforming product design.” In CHI '08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2553-2564. Florence, Italy: ACM, 2008.
• DiSalvo, Carl, Kirsten Boehner, Nicholas A. Knouf, and Phoebe Sengers. “Nourishing the ground for sustainable HCI: considerations from ecologically engaged art.” In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, 385-394. Boston, MA, USA: ACM, 2009.
• Karsten Schmidt. “Sustainablity and generative design.” toxi.in.process 22 Jul 2007.

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