Thanks to http://today.cada1.net/main.php/about for this post.
TODAY is a piece of generative design for mobile phones.
TODAY is a piece of generative design for mobile phones.
It’s an application that visualizes personal mobile communication. It sits on the periphery of the machine, monitoring our connectivity through the number and type of calls we receive, subtly displaying them back to us, in the form of a generative graphic. Here, the visual result is a figurative and seemingly abstract picture – the story of your day. Some days will be really colourful and wired, others quieter and more reflective, either way the resulting visuals will always be personal, unrepeatable and unique.
What lies at TODAY’s core was the idea of using personal data as the basis for an aesthetic system, while providing individuals with a visual diary of their communication patterns.
It’s an intimate piece that ‘lives’ in your pocket.
It's freely distributed for Symbian phones.
Credits:
A Project by CADA
Idea and Design: Sofia Oliveira/Jared Hawkey
Symbian Programming: Heitor Ferreira
Site Developer: Damian Stewart
Each event (call or message) has a graphic symbol that appears on the screen immediately after it's happened. The position of the symbols follows a chronological spiral structure, where the last event is displayed at the center of the spiral . This means that everytime there is a new event, all the graphic symbols move one position, the result being an ever changing and evolving image .
Based on your phone usage, the program generates a graphic of your communication, whereby each phone number used during the course of the cycle, is given a colour and each communication with that colour is measured in time and intensity. Here, intensity is given visual weight through the speed by which you attend the call: an urgent call being literally more colour saturated than an untimely unknown number.
TODAY is a reflection of the user's communication activity and it's output has been designed to be as clear as possible to the user, while providing an aesthetic experience. Visual criteria were simplified to ensure perceptual proximity to the data being visualized, and given that the app lives on such a personal piece of hardware, reading data that's so intimate, making it highly user-friendly was a point of principle.
The Visual System
Each event (call or message) is represented by a coloured graphical symbol that appears on the screen as soon as it's happened.
Each new contact (phone number) in a cycle is assigned a colour throughout the cycle, i.e., if my girlfriend on day X is red, all the contacts with her on that day will be red.
At the start of a new cycle, the first contact is given the colour that follows the last colour used in the previous cycle. Rotating the pallet, in this way, helps to ensure the results are more diverse.
The colours on the below table are examples of the application's 72 colour pallet.
Each colour's alpha (transparency or degree of colour saturation) mirrors the level of a call's intensity - measured by how long one takes to attend a call - in three states: 100%, 75%, 25% .
The size of the call symbol (full circles - incoming calls, or open circles - outgoing calls) expresses the duration of the call in an incremental manner: a long call is a larger circle, a short call a smaller one. To prevent a long argument covering up your so far beautiful graphic, the maximum circle size was restricted to 60% of the screen.
Variables and Visual System
Example 1: Progression of a cycle in three stages.
http://today.cada1.net/main.php
What lies at TODAY’s core was the idea of using personal data as the basis for an aesthetic system, while providing individuals with a visual diary of their communication patterns.
It’s an intimate piece that ‘lives’ in your pocket.
It's freely distributed for Symbian phones.
Credits:
A Project by CADA
Idea and Design: Sofia Oliveira/Jared Hawkey
Symbian Programming: Heitor Ferreira
Site Developer: Damian Stewart
How it works
TODAY processes the communication activity on Symbian based mobile phones. It runs on the background monitoring incoming and outgoing calls and messages (sms and mms) and stores, over a 24-hour or weekly cycle, the data gathered in real-time, such as how long the user took to answer a call, the called/calling party and duration.
TODAY processes the communication activity on Symbian based mobile phones. It runs on the background monitoring incoming and outgoing calls and messages (sms and mms) and stores, over a 24-hour or weekly cycle, the data gathered in real-time, such as how long the user took to answer a call, the called/calling party and duration.
Each event (call or message) has a graphic symbol that appears on the screen immediately after it's happened. The position of the symbols follows a chronological spiral structure, where the last event is displayed at the center of the spiral . This means that everytime there is a new event, all the graphic symbols move one position, the result being an ever changing and evolving image .
Based on your phone usage, the program generates a graphic of your communication, whereby each phone number used during the course of the cycle, is given a colour and each communication with that colour is measured in time and intensity. Here, intensity is given visual weight through the speed by which you attend the call: an urgent call being literally more colour saturated than an untimely unknown number.
TODAY is a reflection of the user's communication activity and it's output has been designed to be as clear as possible to the user, while providing an aesthetic experience. Visual criteria were simplified to ensure perceptual proximity to the data being visualized, and given that the app lives on such a personal piece of hardware, reading data that's so intimate, making it highly user-friendly was a point of principle.
The Visual System
Each event (call or message) is represented by a coloured graphical symbol that appears on the screen as soon as it's happened.
Each new contact (phone number) in a cycle is assigned a colour throughout the cycle, i.e., if my girlfriend on day X is red, all the contacts with her on that day will be red.
At the start of a new cycle, the first contact is given the colour that follows the last colour used in the previous cycle. Rotating the pallet, in this way, helps to ensure the results are more diverse.
The colours on the below table are examples of the application's 72 colour pallet.
Each colour's alpha (transparency or degree of colour saturation) mirrors the level of a call's intensity - measured by how long one takes to attend a call - in three states: 100%, 75%, 25% .
The size of the call symbol (full circles - incoming calls, or open circles - outgoing calls) expresses the duration of the call in an incremental manner: a long call is a larger circle, a short call a smaller one. To prevent a long argument covering up your so far beautiful graphic, the maximum circle size was restricted to 60% of the screen.
Variables and Visual System
Example 1: Progression of a cycle in three stages.
http://today.cada1.net/main.php
1 comment:
You can only imagine the potential of visualising captured data... image how teenagers would latch onto tracking their popularity and their 'BFFs' if each symbol could be personalised and replaced with a photo of the caller...
Post a Comment