In the essay I refer to the underlying politics of data visualizations, explore the meaning of sensuality and metaphors in physical data embodiment projects and their possible link with citizen engagement. I feature three great artworks as example projects, namely: the Soil Library project by Koichi Kurita; Murmur Study by Christopher Baker and  Márton András Juhász; Memorial for the Victims of 25 October 1956 Massacre by Ferenc Callmeyer and József Kampfl.

‘…in the example projects described above, there is an indexical-iconic relationship between the form of representation and the represented data. Soil samples physically represent soil colours, tweets are represented as if they are stored on paper in an archive, and bronze balls are embedded in walls as if they are the physical traces of the bullets fired in 1956.’

 

‘Their shared quality is that they not only appeal to the cognitive but also the sensual parts of our minds.’

 

‘While ‘traditional’ data visualisations emphasise the effectiveness of building understanding, physical data visualisations focus on the power of personal experience in the perceiver. Both are aimed at attracting attention but physical engagement also has the potential to trigger multiple senses in the perceiver, thereby making it an individual experience.’

The book, edited by Angela Plohman and Melinda Sipos, focuses on the recent collaboration between the two labs: a series of workshops in which Dutch and Hungarian artists and designers explored new ways of embodying digital data.

The book will be launched at Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) 2012, on 18 May 2012. More info. Don’t miss the panel discussion on lab collaborations just before the book launch.

Kitchen Budapest and UrbanCyclr teamed up to untangle the invisible pattern of bike traffic in Budapest. 100.000 kilometers of biking routes collected from individual bikers are overlaid on the city map. All distortions of the map reflect higher biking activity in the respective area of the city. 24h map animation reveals the daily biking patterns of a growing community of urban bikers in Budpest.

Urbancyclr application allows bikers to track their biking routes in the city. The individual routes are added to an aggregated map of the bikers’ community. 100.000 kilometers of biking routes have been collected from individual bikers since the launch of the app in 2011.

Submap is a unique tool to visualize geographic and time-based data on distorted maps. It has a huge potential in coping with data from a physically distributed network of independent sensors.

Credits:
Kitchen Budapest | Bujdosó Attila, Feles Dániel, Gergely Krisztián, Kiss László
UrbanCyclr | Füredi Gábor, Megyer László, Véhmann Ferenc
Music | Kiss László

This is for you who has an interest in involving people more in your work, whether you call them users, citizens, customers, stakeholders, or something else. The publication serves both as an introduction and an inspirational expedition into the fields of open innovation, user-driven innovation, design thinking, online community building, and many other approaches to open innovation processes.

The publication, available online and for download at engagingpeople.tumblr.com, featured an interview with me about ‘The physical frames of freedom‘:

“Tech itself is boring! We don’t give a shit about processor speed, we lean to the social side. What is important is how people relate to technology, how it changes culture.”

Photo credit by AZso.

During the 5-days workshop we will explore relations between place and community, trust networks, invisible networks, 2d and embodied datavisualizations as well as community engagement platforms and games. We will map wireless networks invisible in the building, create a 2d or spatial visualization of it and explore its inlaying potential in contributing to building a sense of community.

Workshop leaders: Bujdosó Ildikó, Bujdosó Attila
Invited speaker: Ferenczi Bálint
Keywords: location and community, livability, playful, garden

Thanks to our international distributor Idea Books, atlas entered international bookstores (as also reported by friends from the Netherlands and Brooklyn).

Today I assist to Bálint Ferenczi who runs a workshop ‘Beyond Data’ on data embodiment: http://beyondata.tumblr.com/. This is actually the 4th workshop in the row, initiated by Melinda Sipos at Kitchen Budapest and Angela Plohman at Baltan Laboratories, Eindhoven (whom I just had a chance meeting last Saturday). The workshop will call participants to think beyond data visualizations and draw the outlines of different scenarios when data embodiment can be used as a mean of communication or strategy. The workshop outcomes are intended to be used in the upcoming book on ‘Beyond Data’ to be published in April 2012. I will also contribute to the book with a short essay on how data embodiment as a strategy for citizen engagement.

Funnily I met Manuel Schmalstieg, the originator of the wonderful concept wiki-sprint, which we adopted last year when organizing McLuhan wikisprint at Kunsthalle Budapest. Somehow he discovered that I’m in town, and contacted to meet up for a beer. He showed me a tiny-cute bar, La Petite Reine, and we had a nice discussion about wikipedia art projects, speculative wikipedia entries, and generally what we do.

I joined a workgroup that worked on a topic provided by Amsterdam Municipality, Office of Economic Affairs: finding ways to create / enable / stimulate civic innovation network.

Our focus with the team, consisting of 7 people of diverse professional and national background, was not on sketching the outlines of any platform, tool or ‘the solution’ to support civic innovation. Instead, we developed an understanding of the requisites to make any network – or better name it social infrastructure – sustainable. We mapped the possible motivations of stakeholders to contribute to such a network, investigated the new role of the city government and highlighted that strong citizen innovation requires power shifting from the city towards the public.

As a proposal, we outlined a roadmap of three steps:

1. connecting to existing networks, platforms
2. open up city administration both internally and externally
3. let civic innovators’ network grow

I hope we will go on with topic and hopefully there will be a small report could pu

At this time I also delivered a talk  to tell some words about the background of organizing the Pecha Kucha events. I wanted to share some insights of what I think the core values of Pecha Kucha events are. Above that, the numbers just look awesome: 5 years, 26 events, 300 presenters, 4000 slides, 7500 viewers. My talk was accompanied with a video message by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, founders of Pecha Kucha Night global and architects at Klein-Dytham architecture.

At this very occasion we also organized a party with KÉK, the Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre to celebrate. We had some delicious cake and enjoyed a party underlined with the music by DJ Mesterházy who played music at the very first event back in 2006. Hahh, nice memories…

In my talk I gave an overview of my works as architect (restaurant in Pécs at Téralkotó, CET Budapest at ONL Hungary, Gomba competition with Ádám Vesztergom), researcher (Smoke Viz, Datafizz, SubMap), as social entrepreneur and cultural broker (student union projects, Pecha Kucha Night Budapest, Remix Architecture, McLuhan wikisprint, Subjective Atlas of Hungary).