Max Kiesler - Designer

San Francisco is a very windy city. Because I live here I'm always very curious about the wind patterns. Now because of Francis Ludwig along with some code provided by Nick Thompson I have a way to visualize this. As Francis states, "This new visualization scheme was devloped independently by Nick Thompson who has kindly allowed us use of it. While this may initialy appear to be a time-series animation it is instead a dynamic rendering of particle streaklines. Rather than evolving through time the animation is describing the flow of the wind at a given time." More...

There is a current trend in visualizations to show trends, and statistics to let us all know what is going in the world we live in, and I for one applaud it. Worldometers shows real time numbers created by an, "algorithm that processes the latest and most accurate statistical data available together with its estimated progression to compute the current millisecond number to be displayed on each counter based on the specific time set on each visitor’s computer clock." Var cool. The most interesting thing about this site is the disparagy in the statistics. For example, the difference in energy produced this year (3,950,168,504) and the amount of solar energy striking the earth this year (908,355,014,564). BTW, these change every millisecond so by the time the post was finished the numbers had gone up significantly. This site reminds me of a large lED sign that was up in NYC for some time that showed the U.S. National Debt. Every time I walked past it made me think. This site does the same thing. Check it out and think about the numbers you see. More...

Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs have created a great twitter mash-up called Twistori. As they state in the footer of the website it was inspired by the Jonathan Harris app We Feel Fine. The app draws it's data from another twitter mash-up Summize. I have a positive bias towards Twistori as I love streaming data. I feel it's very engaging and immersive to view data this way - I spent way too much time on Twittervision, Digg Spy and The Artist Network Visualization when they first came out. From an interaction standpoint the only two features I would like to see is a pause button and the ability to click on the tweet and go to twitter. All in all a fun and engaging website. More...

Searchme is new search visualization which lets you see the webpage before you surf there. The idea is pretty neat. As you start to enter a search term you are shown a list of categories that are associated with that term. You can either choose a category, or search all categories. The results are shown in "coverflow" paradigm. You can still sort by category, or just click though the "coverflow" of all of the pages. I love the idea and the execution, however, from a user interface perspective there are a few interactions that would help the UI a great deal. For example, a full screen mode would make seeing the webpages much more useful. Even with a 30 inch Apple HD monitor the pages are a little hard to read. If searchme added a high-rez full screen mode or a way to magnify the page images it would give me a way to see the page relevance to my search. One step beyond that would be to show the highlighted search term(s) on each page as it flew by. Props out to the developers/designers! In my opinion it just needs a little UX love and then we could have a real winner. More...

Are you looking to add the z-axis to your simulations? Well I've tried thinking in 3D, but it still escapes me. Box2D is an open source physics engine written primarily for games. As the name suggests, Box2D is a purely 2D engine. However, Box2D has grown beyond it's humble box simulating roots, and can now handle convex polygons and other shapes coming soon. More...

Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990's to the present. Using the grafarc explorer, you can visit some classic graffiti spots, see what they looked like in the past, and explore how they have changed over the years. More...

The FutureBoston Competitive Edge Landscape is an experimental tool to explore the factors that make or break a city in today's competitive global economy. It integrates data on economics performance, innovation, population, and quality of life to help the user see where and what is happening in the Boston region. This tool is a proof-of-concept. It is intended to demonstrate the early stages of what a more advanced tool could do, i.e., better understand the complex dynamics that effect people's lives and help them make better decisions. More...

This application allows you to interact with demographic data and visualize it in an easy to use manner. It's flash based and is a Microsoft Virtual Earth mashup. It allows you to browse U.S. census data by county, population, age, ethnicity, election results, and income. There are many applications for a website like this, as they say on their site, "For any business to be successful, they must take into account both their customers and surrounding areas. Using Visual Fusion Client and Visual Fusion Server, our Demographics Visualizer allows you to pinpoint components of a region to determine where and how your business can be successful. This application allows the individual user to set their search criteria and cater the results for various uses." More...

The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 kicked of the space race. Since then mankind has sent more than 150 missions to explore outer space. The Newsweek captures all 150 world wide space flights in an easy to use timeline format. The visualization is sortable by year, timespan, planet and country. When you roll over a timeline point you get additional information about the flight. Additionaly, if you click on the Inside Sputnik tab you get a visualization of Sputnik 1 and all of its parts. Very fun and easy to use. More...

Walk2Web is a new way to explore web sites from a specified starting point. You type in a starting point-like http://www.blogschmog.net-and you see a page with a screenshot sample of the site and the first two levels of a search network, with sites as nodes. There are no more than six at a time, split between incoming and outgoing links with options to display more in either direction. The network grows as you explore, allowing you to make use of some simple directional tools to navigate the part of the World Wide Web you are manually crawling. More...