Max Kiesler - Designer

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 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...

"The popularity map shows snapshots of current top artist and album charts by geographical location. The Flash-based interactive map works using data from the Gracenote Media Database and shows the latest artist and album lookups in states, regions, countries, and continents around the world." I like exploring this site as a way to see what the most popular types of music are in different countries. For example, look at the difference in musical tastes between California and Norway. Fun site. More...

Zooming is an important part of THE and this simple demo illustrates some of the ways that zooming solves the navigation problems posed by our present system of links, tabs, and other click-and-go-there interfaces. The design specification calls for the left mouse button to zoom in and the right to zoom out. Unfortunately, Macromedia's Flash, in which this demo was implemented, does not reconize mouse buttons so we have to use the keyboard buttons, even though they are not nearly as pleasant to use. More...

10x10 (ten by ten) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life. More...

Digg Arc is another great data visualization from digg labs that provideds a broader and deeper view of Digg.. As the labs site states, "Digg Arc displays stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere. Arcs trail users as they digg stories across topics. Stories with more diggs make thicker arcs. Labs projects are the results of collaboration with Digg partner Stamen Design. We've also released a public API for Digg so that anyone can turn Digg data into their own visualizations." I spend a lot of time at digg labs to see a more visual and broader view of all stories being dugg. More...

If you frequent websites like Amazon, YouTube, flickr and eBay you probably love the mass of content that you can see at sites like these. As a designer I tire of "sameness" in ways to browse websites. With the exception of flickr the only way to browse the content on these sites is the all to common linear list view. oSkope gives you another. As they say on their website, "oSkope is a search assistant with a highly intuitive visual interface. oSkope lets you browse quickly through a large number of images a preview information with minimal paging. Selected items can be saved by registered users." In many of my test searches I found the information or product I was looking for much more quickly than on the websites themselves. While I can save individual products in a folder I also wish I could save searches. The product is still in beta, however, it is a very fun, intuitive and functional way to search the selected websites. Thanks to the developers and designers. More...

This project is an example of the "elastic list" principle for browsing multi-facetted data structures. The data is based on the Noble prize winners dataset used in the Flamenco facet browser. Elastic lists enhance traditional facet browsing approaches by, visualizing relative proportions (weights) of metadata values by size, visualizing unusualness of a metadata weight by brightness and animated filtering transitions. To use the application click any number of list entries to query the database for a combination of the selected attributes. If you create an "impossible" configuration, your selection will be reduced until a match is possible. You can also switch on little sparklines to see the temporal distribution of each metadata value. While I've seen this concept used several times before the elastic list interface was very fresh. Thanks! More...

Twittervision is a real-time geographic visualization of posts to Twitter. The application is basically a mash-up of the Twitter API and Google Maps. The interaction is smooth and fast and gives you a great vision into who's Twittering around the world and at what speed. If you're as big of a fan of Twitter as I am you spend far too much time viewing the Twitter map. In order to try out the application just sign up for twitter and post. You must have a location and an image defined to appear on the public feed (and to be located on the map). Hats off to David Troy who spent his free time to develop this fun visualization of Twitter. More...

In many ways this site feels like an exploration. There is no about section or faqs, so when you arrive you're not really sure what to expect. As I found out, it turned out to be a wonderful visual experience. The site provides several free software packages that allow you to compose algorithmic music, image and video presentations. The results are stunning as you will see from the examples on the site. While it takes a little getting use to, the flash based navigation is fun easy to use. The downloads are available for Mac and PC. More...