Visual Ecology: a Conversation With Kate Hollenbach

Kate and I are sitting together in the lab drinking tea and exploring what we see as possibly a new way of describing a visualization. We were talking about what would happen if you give data a personality? here goes...

Visual Ecology:
A visualization technique in which the information elements behave as organisms in an ecological system interacting with each other and the topology of the digital landscape.

What happens when people can contribute and influence the content of a visual ecology? We would like to design a system with open ended constraints - and architecture that evolves in response to contribution.

We ask:
What happens when you give data a personality?
How do you get people to explore data visualization?
What happens if the data seeks you out?
What if it interacts with you as much as you interact with it?
What happens when data and people are mutually engaged?

Evocative Metaphors:
-A real-time system that evolves in response to a large group of people (concert/active audience)
-A Garden where data grows and dies and branches
-A Pond of creatures whose behavior is determined by their content
-Any flock with varying individual and group behaviors
-A web or network or net or root system
-Elements with attention getting behaviors (spastic wiggling, irregular & dramatic motions, directed motions, annoying, grotesque, alarming, noisy, they could even say needy things)
-Human Body (avatars, limbs, representations of the viewers body)
-A transforming mirror
-Giving inert elements awareness (eyes)
-Transforming content that we normally think of as static
-Using simple animation techniques to make data more playful

In his article, Transforming Mirrors (1995), David Rokeby presents four paradigms that an interactive work can embody:

-a navigable structure or world,
-a [self-sustaining] creative medium,
-a transforming mirror,
-or a automation

What we are talking about here is perhaps all four - an amalgam in computational form of an interactive art piece, data visualization, animation, and social interaction. Well, it's the start of a framework anyway. no harm in dreaming. :)