For Gunter Pauli it’s the sight of electronic devices that need batteries or electric wires in order to function. For me it’s hard or paved surfaces. For Usman Haque, it’s these pigs in a poke.
These curious obsessions reflect new questions being raised about the design of things.
My obsession first. After being mesmerised by his talk at the Transition Towns event in London, I read Stephan Harding’s book Animate Earth. Animate Earth brings the world of rocks, atmosphere, water and living things vividly – and literally – to life. Harding blends science with intuition in such an extraordinary way that, before I had even finished his book, I found myself looking at tarmac surfaces and concrete runways as criminal artefacts.
Metrics and Aesthetics (cont.)
I can understand why Enrico Giovannini, Chief Statistician of the OECD, is so pleased with with his new visualzation tool, the OECD Factbook Explorer. Few people on the planet can be responsible for a larger volume of statistics than he is – or so aware that the more data proliferate, the harder it is to extract meaning from them.
The new tool has been developed by Mikael Jern and his group at the National Center for Visual Analytics at Linköping University in Sweden. Four large research funds are jointly supporting Sweden’s national focus on the creation of advanced and interactive visualisation tools for complex and multidimensional amounts of data.
Read More »