English

Russell Davies apologizes, though he needn’t.

At the upcoming Le Guess Who? festival, hipsters will employ RFIDs for interesting purposes:

Last week I attended the Design Mind Salon with Bill Buxton (our hero) as one of its speakers. I managed to jot down some quotes by him. All of these are paraphrases but they’re good ones:

Bits of Freedom did a terrific job hosting a salon with Eben Moglen this afternoon at The Hub. As Mr. Moglen did, I am going to take the liberty of assuming you already know who he is 1 and I’m going to proceed to write a biased view of the afternoon.

A short remaindered weeknote (a rather awesome event and dinner packed week indeed):

By the time you’re reading this I will have flown off to the Levant to spend three weeks mainly in Damascus, Syria.

A short week returning from Copenhagen on Monday evening.

I explained the way I twitter to several people over the last weeks and it seems that it is somewhat different than how most people setup their account, so I thought it might be interesting to share.

Yesterday the next ARCAM lecture was held in the Brakke Grond by Jurriaan van Stigt of the firm LEVS.

Goal # I want to create a simple visualization tool for Processing so I can input a set of values for each Dutch municipality and then color a map based on those values.

Last week was mostly busy with getting http://playpilots.nl to talk nicely to the Stereoscoop live game and make stuff work (mostly) properly back and forth. Synchronizing physical installations with websites is always fun.

Wednesday I went to a performance by a Hungarian theater group showing “Hard to be a God” by Kornél Mundruczó a famous Hungarian director after the story by the Soviet Russian brothers science-fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

There’s a lot of stuff happening in the Dutch Data Scene and more communication and consolidation of efforts is in order.

We moved in our new desks and got rid of the old ones. This clears up a lot of space in the studio and we now have a fifth desk open for lease. If you’re design minded and interested in a great place in a creative hub of Amsterdam, get in touch.

I went to the penultimate day of the Matisse to Malevich exposition in the Amsterdam Hermitage for some visual inspiration.

The belated weeknotes for the last week. My apologies. Another inbetween week, with a ton of events.

Alexander and I attended the ARCAM lecture tonight where landscape architect Ronald Rietveld (Rietveld Landscape) sketched a future for Amsterdam that isn’t dormant and touristic, but somewhat ambitious even.

Last week was a short one and mostly spent in preparation of work writing proposals and quotes. I hope we can wrap all that stuff up this week and go back into grand scale production mode.

This week I had my yearly trip to the UK to attend the dConstruct conference in Brighton. Usually I add some time to visit London too and explore the things that need exploring.

Last week was concerned with finalizing stuff for the first presentation of guadalajara. The current concept was more exploratory, we do not seem to have found the point of relevance yet to move forward.

Others have done this, but these are my thoughts.

Last week was a quiet one.

This week was dominated by a bunch of things. Preparations for Stekkerfest and touching up the website for that were very important. Also anticipation for the live demonstration of the first PLAY Pilots live game by Fourcelabs.

From slide 47 on is the core of this presentation by Jan Chipchase:

This week started pretty extreme 1 with 12+ hour days on Monday and Tuesday culminating in the launch of PLAY Pilots.

This week was completely spent with work each day on project Ebi, better known as PLAY Pilots. The site is due to launch this week (it in fact launched yesterday night).

Post-mortems and design overviews will be posted by the appropriate people in due time, but for now the site is live and we are quite happy about it.

Today marks the end of the Dutch presence in Afghanistan and here’s a small data oriented tribute to those that have fallen in service. Inspired by the Home and Away visualization by Stamen, I decided to see if something similar for our Task Force Uruzgan would provide any insight.

Here the first of my English translations of the design principles outlined in the Dutch book by Rathenau about the digitalization of society and its implications.

A quick one.

Project Ebi is taking most of my capacity and brain these days, so everything else is necessarily pushed to the back burner a bit.

Some notes, this time not ordered by day, but by theme.

I was already in the habit of starting my mornings drinking the best coffee in Amsterdam at Stumptown and would regularly chat with the mayor. After planning some morning meetings there, getting an early start, drinking great coffee and having a good conversation with people you’d normally not talk to, proved to be a good idea.

I don’t know how I missed this job in my post this year on “New disciplines for a real-time data world” but this week the position for a Data Griot and Community Activator popped up at Last.fm and was brought to my attention by Chris Heathcote’s post who did some griotting into Grindr (an interesting app worth a post on its own).

Monday # Continuation of Ebi and first deployment to the server. One of my biggest beefs with Django is that any fresh deploy to a server will cost you at least one hour, despite it being the same old stuff you have been doing for ever (as opposed to App Engine).

Let’s see how this goes. Consider this a try out for now.

Some conversations with Jaap Stronks for the terminology and the rifts between UX designers I am witnessing more and more on events (dConstruct, The Web and Beyond) sparked this model below.

What Ben Hammersley uses (besides the travel drug):

This week I biked past Zeeburgereiland on my bike route from the Eastern Docks to IJburg and all I saw was completely desolation and this billboard. I had wanted to bike along side the IJ but this part of the city is so unfinished larg pieces of it are inaccessible.

I recently got glasses to make my vision even better than it already is. Nothing wrong with my eyes, but once you’ve seen the difference in sharpness, you do not want to go back. For me it’s an augment:

This Wednesday was Foursquare Day, but I don’t know who went. We just had ours recently and I just dug up the pictures from my camera:

Haven’t got mine yet, but yes they’re Magic Tables.

Interesting to see that there were a ton of election result charting, display and visualization sites that popped up just before the elections. It seems that this is a hot topic.

Last weekend we released Dutchstats, an online interactive datavisualization of election results and local statistics for Dutch municipalities by Monster Swell, an Amsterdam dataviz agency.

I don’t think I disagree with anything Craig Mod writes.

Last Monday we saw the sixth edition of This Happened taking place and —I haven’t seen all, but I’ve seen more than most— I think this was one of the best ones yet.

Last week we had this piece of news in the Netherlands: “Scholenranglijst van Trouw heeft effect” (School ranking by Dutch newspaper Trouw sorts effect): Trouw has a database on their website with the statistics from our board of education which they editorialize and republish on their Schoolprestaties site. The news piece reports on research that shows this ranking has a real effect both in prospective school choice and in school improvement.

With the upcoming Dutch elections the campaigns are heating up and we will be allowed to choose our parliamentary representatives yet again. It is interesting to see how statistics and their visualization are used to clarify and position issues in our complex world.

This entire weekend was taken up by Amsterdam Music Hackday for which Alex, Dirk and I had planned to build a prototype version of a surface table projector for music discovery.