As one of those happy-to-look-forward-to yearly traditions (see also the 2008, 2007, 2006 and 2005 versions), infographic designer Nicholas Felton has again released a sophisticated infographic report [feltron.com] detailing almost all his past everyday and special activities and visited events during the timespan of last year.

The data he tracks each single day (each single minute?) seems to be more and more detailed each single year, and now include a wide variety of topics such as: encounters (average encounters per day: 4.8), relationships (shortest relationship: 5 minutes), location and methods of transportation (number of different methods: 23), mood (types of negative mood: 80), food consumption (New York restaurants visited: 111), drink consumption (most "reported" beverage: beer) and little things (unfortunate incidents: 4).

Thnkx Tim!

Inspired by the Ars Electronica Golden Nica-winning Nuage Vert project, Pixelache, an informally organised network of electronic art festivals, and Helsingin Energia, one of the largest energy companies in Finland, are collaborating to produce artworks related to the collective energy consumption in the Helsinki area. A selection of artists were invited to submit proposals for artworks, of which the very best will be built within the public space in Helsinki or presented as online web projects. The proposals for these artworks can be found at the "Art & Energy" [pixelache.ac] webpage.

They include "Human Viz", a series of unpredictable events, implemented by human action, visualizing Helsinki Energia's energy consumption data. Flash mobs, sudden gatherings of people of different ages and backgrounds, would occur at specific locations to convey the representative red and blue colors from an online diagram of current heat and electricity. (See also Human-Driven Media Facade). "Andy Best" is a kinetic sculpture that reacts to the current energy usage, and could be produced in any scale, from table top objects for the home or office, to a large public sculpture for a whole neighborhood (see also Vision Energy Sculpture).

"Blink Helsinki aka Blink at Home" is a collective effort to draw attention to energy consumption on city wide level, by inviting individual households to blink their lights at a predetermined visual pattern revealing energy consumption in Helsinki. "Energy Fame" paints the energy levels as projected light onto people, turning them into representations of their energy use, as citizens of Finland. "Hot Lights" connects Helsinki's use of district heating to its public, urban outdoor lighting system: when heat consumption is high, street lamps will pulsate slowly.

Thnkx Monika!

PS. For more physical visualizations of sustainability-related issues, check out the 3 finalists of San Jose's Climate Clock Challenge that was organized last year.

This tip came to me with the sneaky message "The New York Times starts off the year with what could be the least informative graphic of '10". Well, is it?

In fact, regular readers readers might notice this is an almost yearly re-occuring infosthetics post, as one might remember "Comparing US Soldier Casualty Statistics in Iraq and Afghanistan" from February last year, and Iraq Casualties for Dummies back in 2007. In spite of the many comments and suggestions that especially the 2007 post generated, the visual and infographic style was kept consistent.

In short, the infographic titled "A Year in Iraq and Afghanistan" (PDF, 7.5MB!) [nytimes.com] accompanies an "Op-Chart", meaning that it was designed outside of the NYTimes Infographics Department. Based on data from icasualties.org and the Pentagon, the chart shows how the death toll in Afghanistan is up by 40 percent from last year, and that most of the deaths are occurring on the battlefield, unlike in Iraq, where half the fatalities were not related to combat. In addition, while many see the war in Afghanistan as an American effort, the colors on the chart show the extent to which the Western allies are sharing the deadly burden.

Thnkx John!

Two of the very best visualization designers and researchers around today, Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, have started a new website, titled Hint.fm [hint.fm] (or it exists much longer and I just didn't know). The website collects their past presentations, publications, exhibitions, press coverage, and all of their works, of which Many Eyes, FleshMap, and Phrase Nets are just a few. Most projects are remarkable in their apparent focus on combining the aspects of beauty and story-telling through the presentation data. As they state themselves in the colophon, "Unlike ... traditional uses, we believe visualization to be an expressive medium that invites emotion."

Two latest project stand out. "Flickr Flow" is based on a large collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. A specifically design algorithm calculates the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel. The resulting diagram picks up the ebb and flow of seasonal colors.

Web Seer" attempts to visualize people's innermost thoughts by using data originating from Google Suggest (the drop-down box that guesses your search query while you write). The interactive tool contrast two separate search queries, as it highlights the commonly shared and opposite suggestions proposed by the Google algorithm. The arrow thicknesses show the number of web pages for each question. Insightful examples include "are Democrats" versus "are Republicans", or "shopping for men" versus "shopping for women". Both authors describe a qualitative analysis of the resulting graphs at a recent op-ed ("op-chart") in The New York Times.

A great, short talk by TargetPoint's VP and Director of Research, Alex Lundry, at DC Ignite. He addresses the issues of subjective messaging through visualization, the emergence of open data, some ideal data visualization tools, a set of quick lessons in graphic literacy, and a short list of recommended visualization books, all within the time span of 5 minutes.

Watch the movie below.

See also Political Chart Wars for more information about the subject. Via Sunlight Foundation Blog.