Archives: article
Observations on media and site
As sited media becomes more pervasive, it is also increasingly seamless. Integrated with architecture, it no longer appears as a singular anomaly or product, and instead as an interpretive layer—draped over the physical landscape and augmenting our experience of the concrete and tangible. Unlike location-aware mobile media, sited media has the potential to not merely [...]
Visualization and rhetoric redux
A chart depicting the health plan proposed by the House Democrats has recently come to the forefront of the media. It is hard to overlook the rhetorical bias of this visualization—with almost comical overstatement and unnecessary visual complexity it depicts the proposed heath care system through a flow chart consisting of an entangled mess of [...]
Three New York Times visualizations
Given that the New York Times Graphics Department is a winner in this year’s National Design Awards, it seemed opportune to look back at some of its recent work. Over the past few years, the Times has published many excellent interactive visualizations as counterparts to the equally brilliant static information graphics found in the paper, [...]
Social media and protocol
Social media is the largest mainstream technological development of recent years. While it has undeniably lead to an increase in the interactions we have with others, I would argue that these interactions also inherently seem less meaningful due to more stringent mediation. The latest generation of social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and [...]
The authority of formlessness
Form inevitably creates narrative, disclosing the intent and the hand of the author. Whether linear or non-linear, any narrative contains a particular point of view. On the other hand, formlessness allows for unencumbered individual interpretation. I think of formlessness in its purest state as randomness. The only true opposition to structure, it gives equal importance [...]