Fabricated version of yesterday’s idea
Sorry that I haven’t posted at all since I defended my thesis last week. I’ve been finishing up my tenure at Etsy, packing for my move, and trying to get some rest.
Here is my thesis paper, and I also uploaded some more pictures to Flickr.
Fabricated version of yesterday’s idea
Something that Engin told me a couple of weeks ago (“time you sit in a seat on a flight isn’t something of value, you should move away from the data you have towards the destinations themselves”) really stuck when Marius Watz re-iterated the same thing over an email conversation, when he called travel a “depersonalizing experience”. As all my initial samples were “air travel enthusiasts”, this is an obvious perspective I missed.
I know that this isn’t the time for new ideas, taking this into account, I tried a topography, where I map business-related travel to positive hills and leisure travel to negative valleys (and augment them for a combination of both, instead of them canceling each other out).
Since I couldn’t find an easy way to figure gradients in processing, I created the heightmap for this manually in illustrator. Then I used the BlobDetector processing library to extract the edges.
Hopefully I’ll figure out a way to produce this tomorrow from foamboard, so I can see if it works or not.
However cool it might turn out, since this is kind of similar to Fundament or Maya Lin’s work, I’m not inclined to make it my final product.
Talked with Jer Thorp today on my thesis work. After I talked non-stop for 10 minutes outlining 2 months of my work, Jer leaned back on his chair and thought aloud…
(the following is me reconstructing what I remember from our conversations since I didn’t record it)
Your project resonates with me in two ways: looking at data from another perspective (relating to my geography-timeline stacks), and visualizing an emotional, a more human landscape.
So, I travel a lot, mostly for conferences. I’m wondering what sort of an object I’d like to keep for myself after a year, to see where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Plotting paths of where I’ve been isn’t that interesting… I’m more interested in how important the trip was for me. For example I went to Vancouver 4 times with my Girlfriend, and one of these times I introduced her to my family, and that trip was far more important than other ones.
Another dimension is how much time I spent at the destination. I might go somewhere nearby, like Canada for a week, or to London for a weekend. How does the distance and time spent compare?
It would also be interesting to see the purpose of those trips. When you fill out a customs form, you’re asked if the purpose of a trip was business or pleasure. Suppose I went on a trip for a conference, and also saw some friends. You should think about what sort of a scale would be meaningful.
The key take-away: you need another axis for this to be interesting.
So, even though I set out to visualize travel data coming from TripIt, as I articulate my aim better (a personal travel journal object), I realize I need more data than just times and coordinates. I already moved away from the ‘mass-producable’ aim by going with stacks of hand-painted laser-cut plexiglass as opposed to a 3D printed object. I wonder if requiring more manual input from the user is worth their effort, provided it is going to result in a more meaningful object.
My initial aim was to produce a physical object that would reveal data in different ways by looking at the object from different angles. I think I’m close to achieving that when I map coordinates to a plate, and use depth as the time axis. But making many objects using this principle revealed to me the fact that, that itself isn’t enough. I didn’t really articulate the “object I’d like to keep, that tells me about my travels” aspect until later.
I got this feedback from many different people, but because I wanted to go forward with my initial plan of using TripIt’s API, I was reluctant to use other data than what I had available, and it seems like this effort didn’t really go anywhere. I thought I was too far into the project to change my plan, but I keep stumbling into the same wall, that this data just isn’t emotionally relevant enough to people.
It turns out that my initial premise, “I want to make a cool object with the TripIt API” wasn’t the right starting point. As I had to articulate the “why” for the paper, I came up with the “travel journal” aspect, but the work I did before didn’t really match that purpose. I guess I should have tried to articulate a better “why” much earlier in the process. I spent weeks playing with projections and code to generate timelines, but right now I’m throwing most of that work away.
I have two weeks to make my final object and submit my final paper, it looks like my thesis is taking a large turn, that I won’t be using the TripIt API after all. Good luck to me.
Here’s how I painted my map.
Progress so far. The cube and map I have here are pretty close to what I intended to make last week, except the coloring.
I’ll have to rethink many parts based on Ivana’s feedback though. Again and again, I realize I have to spend hours making the damn object just to realize it doesn’t work.
Maybe I should come up with my own map projection, in other words, scrap the map completely. I wonder if I can come up with a transformation that would conserve some dimensions (east-west, north-south) and still be ambiguous.
Keywords: material, time, accumulation, narrative.
It was definitely more interesting before you told me what it is.
What’s the point of this? It’s just a literal representation of the data, you aren’t doing anything with it.
I had no way of telling what this is before you told me anyhow, so you might as well abstract the data even more. Find a couple of aspects of the data you want to highlight and get rid of the rest.
The way you handle the material is very bland, you aren’t considering the nature of the material. You’re treating them as if they were layers in Illustrator… What’s the point?
As you move from layer to layer time is accumulating, and you aren’t considering that. There’s more to time than jumping onto another layer. Your piece pretends as if with every layer time restarts, but that’s not the case. You should try to carry data from one layer to the next and see that in the material… if you drilled it, would it crack?
— Ivana stopped by my desk to give me the first brutally honest piece of feedback about my thesis work. I appreciate that so much.
In the Peirce projection, great circle arc aren’t really arcs! Aaargh.
Month my month.
Speaking of maps, here are some map projections I considered for my project. The peirce projection seems to have won for the time being, since I very much would like to make a cube. If I have a square map, I can use a similar depth to make a cube.
This page has almost every map projection every known to mankind. A must-read.
Iteration 4 I repeated to do the “blob timeline” view the Peirce quincuncial projection, which is a way to project the world map onto a square. It fits my purpose, since I wanted to end up with a cube.
With no extra markings, the blobs aren’t very visible. I did a sloppy job painting the borders and it’s a bit better. The blob shapes need a lot of work. I need to make them thinner, because at this scale they take up too much space on the map so don’t really show what’s happening. Also I feel like I could create a more organic, pleasant looking blob. I’m also trying to figure out a better way to etch the corners. Laser etching and filling the gaps with paint worked well, I guess I’ll be repeating that. Would a Sharpie be too lame? :-)
I should also add a lightly etched Peirce projection world map in this.
Iteration 3 I painted the inner walls of gaps I created by cutting out blobs, which still didn’t help when I kept etched flights. The shape became almost more approachable when I took out the blobs, but still not there. Edges of blobs aren’t very visible from the top, moreover, the shape of the blob needs work.
Iteration 3 To make the etched flight paths clearer, I painted them. I accomplished this by painting over the whole surface and then wiping the excess paint off, leaving paint inside the etched gap. This still didn’t help with the refraction problem.
Iteration 3 I wanted to etch all the flights taken within a time period (3 months) on a plate, and draw a blob around it representing the location of the overall motion. I used a regular map projection and represented frequency with wiggles.
Again, the idea turned out to be too detailed for the cutter, and refraction from the edges of blobs made it pretty unreadable.
Denoting more activity/higher frequency within a route with wiggles made sense at first, so I spent plenty of time coding it and getting it right. However, later it turned out that paths and wiggles were too detailed for the laser cutter.
