I feel like it’s been forever since my last post, so I just wanted to let everyone know that I am not dead.
It’s the last few days here at Visualizar so I’ve got a couple of late nights ahead to make sure we get our project done, and on Wednesday, we set things up for the one-month exhibition. That should be fun. It’ll be especially nice to see everyone else’s work out on display.
The most interesting part about this workshop has probably been working and talking to designers about data visualization. I’m a statistician. Everyone else is a designer of some sort. With a statistics background and just coming off my New York Times internship, it felt really strange for the first week to go from the very literal and straightforward representation of data to the artsy, metaphorical data visualizations.
The defining moment — when I saw a huge difference between designers and statisticians’ views on visualization — was what followed after a talk from someone from the GapMinder foundation.
I’ll get into all of this stuff I’ve learned once I return to the lovely United States of America. In the meantime though, there was short blurb about the Visualizar workshop on We Make Money Not Art. There’s a picture of my back. I’m famous.
Oh, and if you’re really bored, the MediaLab has a Flickr stream. They’ve been taking tons of photos.
