MudLog

Finally finished the first application that uses MudSketch. Modster is a graphical exquisite corpse, each of which are drawn by three people. Participants draw a portion of the corpse in sequence: head, torso and leg. Each of the three participants must contribute and submit a drawing – otherwise the corpse will never be completed, making the creation process truely collaborative and participation dependent.

I have a few project ideas that involve drawing, and I needed to start by creating reusable drawing code. I finished it and just wanted to put it up. It’s called MudSketch, all the interesting work stuff is in the /javascripts/MudSketch directory. Now that the tedious part is done, I can start working on the actual projects! BTW this counts as my July webapp…

Here’s a simple tool called MITPTyper. Any phrase you type into the text box will render it as Muriel Cooper’s MIT Press logo. I know this is a small project, but it’s going to count as my April project.

Eariler this week, us first year students from PLW took a quick trip to New York to attend Edward Tufte’s workshop. The train ride into New York was plesant, but the ride back was a total disaster. Also, thanks to my good friend Jeff (happy birthday buddy!) for letting me crash at his place. Anyway, back to the workshop, here’s the trip report.

To Tufte or not to Tufte…
Trip Report for Tufte Trip, August 23, 2006. New York City.
Takashi Okamoto

Overall, I enjoyed the Ed Tufte workshop in New York. His talk was divided into two parts, pre-lunch and post-lunch sessions. The first half of the workshop was great. He explained in detail, the “Fundamental Principles of Analytical Design,” which breaks down to:

1. Comparisons
2. Causality, Mechanism, Structure, Explanation
3. Multivariate Analysis
4. Integration of Evidence
5. Documentation
6. Content Counts Most of All

He emphasized that “content” is most important; design won’t help if the content is weak (Principle 6.) So get better content! “Resolution” is the other key point, and he claimed that advances in science and our technical ability to achieve higher resolution is equivalent. Relating to higher resolution, he said everybody should work with two monitors in order to aid in comparison. So having two monitors is very important! Good thing John sets all of us up with a two monitor setup. Tufte says content needs to be dense, you shouldn’t cherry pick anything, and that the high resolution design will make that dense information more accessible. Cherry picking relates to something he emphasized over and over throughout the workshop. The main point to the workshop seemed to be about one thing: Content Integrity. As presenters of content, we need to make sure the content is credible, and not cherry picked to advance our own agenda; and as consumers of content, we need to make sure we question the validity of the content. He pushed this point over and over again.

In terms of technical instruction, the topic floated around Sparklines. Sparkline is “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics,” which is a visual technique that can install high resolution information inline, within texts. I think Sparklines are useful, but only for two dimensional data, where one is temporal. His examples didn’t help much either, since he only talked about stock market data and sports scores, so I felt he made a huge deal about something you can explain in one sentence. He should have talked about links and causal arrows instead.

The second half of the talk was awful and there’s not much to say. He became preachy and cultish and went on and on about how bad powerpoint is. He basically blamed Microsoft for Columbia’s burn up in the atmosphere, because NASA engineers used a badly designed powerpoint presentation instead of writing a full technical report of the foam hitting the shuttle’s wing at lift off. It was so awful I wanted to walk out and curse at him for cherry picking (Kyle passed me a note pointing that out.)

One of my interest at the lab is to make information more accessible. With effective design (and interaction) you can make dense information accessible to a wider audience. Tufte’s workshop did shed new light into this, and I think once I finish reading all of his books, it would make me a better deliverer of information (and hopefully a non-biased credible one.) The lesson on good content is a relevant one for the whole group, especially for PLWire. I think whenever we post new content onto the site, we should make sure that the content is relevant and the viewers find it interesting and comprehendible.

We just launched the new PLW site which we call PLWire. We no longer have text, we have a collection of videos, graphics, links and people. I think it’s a fun site, although it wasn’t fun to build. Too many JavaScript issues. Everybody in PLW can add and delete “modules,” but the most interesting part is that no user information is attached — so we don’t know who uploaded and deleted what. My hope is that it’ll somehow create tension, because tension is good. I call this anonymous editing.

BTW: Check out all the videos and pictures from SIGGRAPH. I didn’t end up posting any pictures to this site, because I’m too lazy.

Starting tomorrow, the PLW team will be hanging out at SIGGRAPH. I’m specifically curious about discussion panels surrounding Digital Rights and Licenses, since I’m currently working on PLWicense: an online license creator. More on that in a future entry, but the initial release is ready to go.

Hopefully I’ll have images from SIGGRAPH here during the week, but I’m not much of a picture taker, so who knows. I’ll be at the fashion show for sure. Here is the website I made for it. See you at the bar.

It’s been a fun week but I didn’t get much work done because we had SIMPLICITY events to attend. I did however start working on the new PLW website, which should be completed by SIGGRAPH2006. The PLW team will be there, so I think it’ll be fun and a nice break out of the lab.

It’s new logo Saturday! Here are new logos for OpenStudio (of course I haven’t gotten everybody’s OK) and PLWire (which will be the name of the new PLW service) that I worked on this week.