Eric Rodenbeck — Information visualization as a medium

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.

Session descrip­tion

Information visu­al­iza­tion is becom­ing more than a set of tools and tech­nolo­gies and tech­niques to under­stand large data sets. It is emerg­ing as a medium in its own right, with a wide range of expres­sive potential.

Stamen’s work in visu­al­iza­tion and map­ping is among the most high pro­file online today, with the live dynamic dis­plays at Digg Labs and Cabspotting being just two of many exam­ples. The studio’s approach is deeply prag­matic, always start­ing with real data and aim­ing to work with graph­ics on screen as soon as pos­si­ble. Though all analy­sis is a work in progress, a project is usu­ally fin­ished when it shows some­thing nobody has seen before, or builds a vocab­u­lary for describ­ing a sys­tem, or offers more ques­tions than answers. And then the process begins again.

Rodenbeck will pro­vide an overview of the studio’s recent projects, and insight into the studio’s work­ing process.

About Eric Rodenbeck

Eric Rodenbeck Portrait

Eric Rodenbeck is founder and cre­ative direc­tor of Stamen Design. He is a 10-​​year vet­eran of the inter­ac­tive design field, and has spent this time work­ing to extend the bound­aries of online media and live infor­ma­tion visualization.

Eric led the inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling and data-​​driven nar­ra­tive effort at Quokka Sports, illus­trated and designed at Wired and Wired Books, and was a co-​​founder of the design col­lec­tive Umwow. He has lec­tured and spo­ken at Yale University, the University of Southern California, numer­ous O’Reilly tech­nol­ogy con­fer­ences, Esther Dyson’s PC Forum, and South by Southwest, among oth­ers. Eric stud­ied archi­tec­ture at Cooper Union in New York City and received a B.A. in the History and Philosophy of Technology from The New School for Social Research.

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2 responses to “Eric Rodenbeck — Information visualization as a medium”:

    • By:jive
    • May 5th, 2008

    Without slides its hard to fol­low this video, because I have to imag­ine what the visu­al­iza­tions look like that he is mentioning.

    • By:sincerity77
    • November 18th, 2008

    I agree! I lis­tened to the audio only ver­sion first and I was very frus­trated. Fortunately there is a video of the talk online too at these places:

    http://​www​.thought​ware​.tv/​v​i​d​e​o​s​/​s​h​o​w​/​2​930
    http://​etech​.blip​.tv/​f​i​l​e​/​1​0​1​8​1​80/

    hope this helps!

    –s77

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