king talk

Gary Flake from Microsoft research delivered a fascinating demo of »Microsoft Pivot«, an experimental technology which focuses on browsing collections of content and pages, rather than individual pieces of content.  It looks like if the Zooming User Interface (ZUI) is based on the idea of Microsoft‘s Photosynth technology which was presented by Blaise Aguera three years ago. The concept of viewing, filtering and pivoting collections of web pages based on various attributes pulled from the content represents an exciting possible future state for web browsing. I am very curious to see how this technology evolves, and whether this type of application could be used to create views of custom large data sets, spot patterns and identify actions.  I also wonder how long it will be before some of this functionality emerges directly within Bing – exciting times!

At this years UK election, the results of the general election are to be projected on to St Stephen’s Tower, which houses Big Ben, for the first time, by the BBC. The idea behind projecting the results in this way is to provide a clear and simple source of information and to create an »arresting« image.

The results projection, which will be removed after dawn on 7 May, will feature a »winning line«, representing the 326 seats that any party will need to win to be sure of an outright victory. The idea was approved by the parliamentary authorities, responsible for the management of its buildings and the BBC is said to be »delighted« with the initiative.

via infosthetics

We spent the better part of last weekend in Graz with the fine students of FH JOANNEUMs information design department. They were taking part in a workshop on Processing and the general idea of computed and generative design.

Our basic idea was to present the students with snippets of code that can be combined in different ways in order to foster creative use of programming languages.

The outcomes quite frankly exceeded our expectations. You can explore them in their full variety in this flickr set.

Congratulations to all participants for what you achieved:
Christoph Mauerhofer
Franz Ferdinand Kubin
Gianna Tatzel
Julian Kogler
Lisa Weishäupl
Magdalena Kahr
Moritz Rzehak
Roland Mariacher
Thomas Raggam

We hope you enjoyed the two days as much as we did!

We are working on something. It’s about presenting information and we are confident that it will rock quite a bit.

More to come this fall!