InfoVis 2004

I just returned from the InfoVis 2004 Conference in Austin, Texas. As the only Parsons student present at the Conference I feel the responsibility of exposing some of the projects shown there. This trip was sponsored by “PIIM - Parsons Institute of Information Mapping” where I’ve been working for the past month as a design researcher. I went together with Takaaki Okada, also from PIIM.

We arrived there Sunday morning, October 10th, very exhausted and with almost no sleep. The afternoon was spent around the streets of downtown Austin, enjoying the hot weather, quiet streets and overall tranquil surroundings. Good food, good music, cheap beer and pleasant people, some of the qualities the capital of Texas has to offer.

Ok back to the conference now. Monday was for me the best day, not only in terms of presented papers, but also because of the poster session. The poster session was very worthy and probably the best event of the conference. First, we could talk directly to the designers (not that many), authors and researchers. Second, we were able to try the prototypes ourselves, and not just see nice screen-shots. Third, because most of the projects were still under construction, we could make suggestions and brainstorm with the authors about other possible improvements. Actually I must admit that many authors, most of them computer scientists, when realizing that I was from Parsons, instantly asked for design suggestions or opinions. It was also very interesting to notice that Parsons is very respected in an environment mostly filled with computer scientists, mathematicians and programmers.

Tuesday was of poorer quality compared to the previous day. Too many discussions on algorithms, equations and optimization, and not so much on visualization. Even with speakers as renowned as Steve Roth from Carnegie Mellon and George Robertson from Microsoft Research, I believe Monday had much more spice and innovation in the shown papers.

Among the few designers at the Conference were David Lu and Fernanda Viegas. David Lu is a designer at IDEO and is a nice friendly guy. He was there to present a poster on his “Tenable Information” project that you can try here . He also has some interesting projects on his personal website. Fernanda Viegas, in case you don’t know her, is a major reference for me. She is pursuing a PhD at the Sociable Media Group at MIT Media Lab, and she has been involved in projects such as “Artifacts of the Presence Era” and “PostHistory”. Althought she talked at the conference about the first mentioned project, I think the last one is truly amazing. For more information here’s her research projects website.

I’ll describe some of the most relevant projects at InfoVis 2004 in future posts.

Here are the links:

> InfoVis 2004 Conference Website.
> InfoVis 2004 Conference Program (pdf).