InformationDynamics

My company nForm is creating another set of user experience trading cards for the IA Summit this year (we published last year's card set over at uxmethods.com).

We've got 15 of the 16 cards, but we're looking for one more user experience method, tool or technique to round out the set. We want to find that one tool that's undervalued in our day-to-day work, the one that should get more attention, the one that helps you kick-ass. So we're asking the community (yes, you) for suggestions. Have a look at last year's set to get some ideas, and keep in mind that we've got the obvious stuff covered.

Entering this contest is as easy as completing this two-line survey by midnight Sunday. The winner (decided by our team) will get a copy of my book Tagging plus a complete set of 2008 trading cards, acknowledgment on our website, and the everlasting respect of your peers.

Jess has a few more details over on our blog.

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RISD.tv hosts an online laboratory for pedagogical experimentation and research into the possibilities of non-linear, networked video production. The site utilizes Lepton, a set of video collaboration tools developed by the Lepton Group, composed of Dennis Hlynksy, Chuan Khoo and Daniel Peltz, that provide the means to create and visualize non-linear works in which the interconnections of submissions are obvious and emphasized.

The visualization and tracking of how ideas are associated across and within cultures of media makers is the focus of their initial explorations. RISD.tv provides a framework for dialogue through web-based video production, where people can communicate through 30-second videos and create a new note to respond to someone's video. Using video as a language establishes a means for cross-cultural, multinational dialogue that does not depend on common spoken or written languages.

The images shown here feature the third installment of the Call and Response video dialogue project. It includes participants at the Rhode Island School of Design in the U.S., Ewha Womans University in Korea, University of Yaounde I in Cameroon and Ecole des Beaux-arts de Valenciennes in France. It is also the first series to be constructed with the new Lepton interface and video collaboration tools.

Textour is an interactive tool that allows the analysis of a large body of text through a radial convergence visualization. As Tim Walter explains: "I got inspired to develop this application as my diploma project because the digitalization of media and the internet make many texts on the internet easily accessible to everyone; written literature on the other hand is mostly not accessible on the internet. As a consequence, there is a need to access this information via the same digital tools (...) I therefore dealt with the big market of text mining; as an information designer I wanted to think about the appearance of text in general and a new way to visualize a text for different purposes."

Due to the fact that every text is more or less carefully articulated, speeches but also narrative and law texts make language a very complex subject that is difficult to analyze properly. Nevertheless, it is possible to discover certain rules which show that every text is a system of words where length, position and frequency do not appear at random. In Textour, Tim Walter integrated some basic filters (text restriction, sentence restriction, word restriction, sentence length, word length, word frequency) to discover keywords and text patterns. The key advantage of these basic filters is that they work automatically and are flexible enough to be transferred to other languages.

Here is how Tim describes the method used on this visualization: "First of all I split the text into the different sentences, words and letters and then I re-connected them to the corresponding lines. After that I arranged the different text elements, letters, words and sentences on three different circles around a common center. (...) Every time a letter, word or sentence is entered into the program, the visualisation integrates the new item and the elements appear on the right point of intersection of line through the center and the circles and re-arranges the rest of the elements in a clockwise manner. The different colours in the visualization represent every single word and are attributed to the word the first time the word appears, they also show when a word appeared for the first time and how often it was found in the whole text".

wirmachenbunt is a company specialized in building interactive objects, prototyping and motion graphics. This network of creatives, drifting between a strong affinity to technology, design, art and commercial applications, aims at providing unique solutions for almost every case that involves light and interaction, from the abuse of projectors to illuminate a floor or using electronics and microcontrollers to create objects with senses. As they proclaim on their site: "we create the tools, the toys and rock solid products".

Prototouch is wirmachenbunt's first multi-touch prototype, a display recognizing multiple touches as well as being pressure sensitive. The method used is the well known FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) trick, developed by Jeff Han. No off-the-shelf software is being used for Prototouch, which means that the authors had to craft their own code for tracking and visualization using VVVV. This customized toolkit, including self-made freeframe plugins, is very reliable and accurate. And as they explain on the site, the prototype is now quite robust against daylight and has low latency, although both parameters will be improved in the future. wirmachenbunt says they are currently working on different projects that incorporate multi-touch and they hope that Prototouch will serve as a flexible test platform.

One of the apparent advantages of this tool, as seen on the demo movie, is the dynamic control and exploration of network visualizations. It certainly opens a door for promising interactive tools where users become an integral part of the visualization due to its immersive nature.