Life & Research Notes

Taco Lab is a design and prototyping firm that I am co-founding with my friend and fellow Media Lab grad Jeevan Kalanithi. Our clients so far have included Hallmark, Panasonic, HandsOnToys, and Qixen-P. This week we’re settling into some studio space with our friends at Electric Works, and soon we’ll have a real portfolio up online, plus maybe even an occasional Taco fanclub newsletter.

I’m also happy to watch Swivel continue to make real progress after I change my relationship with them. With Swivel Business now in a public beta with real customers, plus a strategic redesign of certain key interactions in the works, Swivel’s future looks really bright. Plus the transition is happening on good terms for everyone, so I know we’ll all stay in touch and probably even continue working together.

Thanks to all you friends who bother to read this and who have supported me in this big change! You have an open invitation to come design, code, build, and dork around with Jeevan and me in our new TL office v1beta (which I promise will be way better than alpha), coming very soon.

While I’d like to be reporting lofty revelations about transformational design and social data analysis, those topics seem like a lot to tackle at this point, especially since I’m sitting on the floor and low on batteries. So I’ll just summarize my situation: Florence is beautiful, the workshop yesterday was excellent, and dinner at Buca Mario last night was delicious (few things can beat a fantastically giant 30 euro aged T-bone steak, except perhaps those succulent shavings of lard). Subsequent guinnesses at the nearby Irish bar (staffed by legitimate Irish expat bartenders) didn’t hurt either.

Not sure of my exact plan yet, but I have four days here at CHI, and pretty much every day has at least a few presentations I want to see. I’ve already run into a couple crews of people I know from Stanford, MIT, and the visualization community. It’s great to see familiar faces here, and to be meeting and interacting with all these creative, curious people.

After CHI I’ll take a week to cruise around Italy, most likely hitting Rome and Venice. For a number of reasons, when traveling alone I tend to want to stick to cities. Looking forward to sitting on park benches in piazzas, drinking beer, eating paninis, feeding the pigeons, and scoping out the locals and tourists as they wander past.

I love this admin interface for the 37signals unified billing and monitoring system, Queen Bee.

When Huned saw it his reaction was, “oh, it’s like top for your business,” which is a great description. This concept of live business data streams is a big part of the new Swivel business product we’re taking into beta shortly. We’re excited to bring these paradigms to a wider audience of people and teams who don’t have the resources to roll their own solutions.

$ cat /usr/share/misc/flowers
# Flower : Meaning
#       @(#)flowers     8.1 (Berkeley) 6/8/93
#
# Upside down reverses the meaning.
African violet:Such worth is rare.
Apple blossom:Preference.
Bachelor's button:Celibacy.
Bay leaf:I change but in death.
Camelia:Reflected loveliness.
Chrysanthemum, other color:Slighted love.
Chrysanthemum, red:I love.
Chrysanthemum, white:Truth.
Clover:Be mine.
Crocus:Abuse not.
Daffodil:Innocence.
Forget-me-not:True love.
Fuchsia:Fast.
Gardenia:Secret, untold love.
Honeysuckle:Bonds of love.
Ivy:Friendship, fidelity, marriage.
Jasmine:Amiability, transports of joy, sensuality.
Leaves (dead):Melancholy.
Lilac:Youthful innocence.
Lilly of the valley:Return of happiness.
Lilly:Purity, sweetness.
Magnolia:Dignity, perseverance.
Marigold:Jealousy.
Mint:Virtue.
Orange blossom:Your purity equals your loveliness.
Orchid:Beauty, magnificence.
Pansy:Thoughts.
Peach blossom:I am your captive.
Petunia:Your presence soothes me.
Poppy:Sleep.
Rose, any color:Love.
Rose, deep red:Bashful shame.
Rose, single, pink:Simplicity.
Rose, thornless, any color:Early attachment.
Rose, white:I am worthy of you.
Rose, yellow:Decrease of love, rise of jealousy.
Rosebud, white:Girlhood, and a heart ignorant of love.
Rosemary:Remembrance.
Sunflower:Haughtiness.
Tulip, red:Declaration of love.
Tulip, yellow:Hopeless love.
Violet, blue:Faithfulness.
Violet, white:Modesty.
Zinnia:Thoughts of absent friends.

Thanks Visnu.

Just a quick note that I’ll be attending CHI 2008 this April, participating in the Social Data Analysis workshop organized by Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Jeff Heer, and Maneesh Agrawala. I finally remembered to register today. If anyone reading this will be there, or knows anyone interesting there I should meet up with, drop me a line.

Nice mention on Infosthetics of the InfoVis panel I participated in last week. I also wrote a short post and slides from my position talk on the Swivel blog. While it would take more than a roomful of researchers for me to label something a “revolution,” I am certain collaborative data systems are going to be big. It’s great to stay connected with the research side of the discussion, especially in Visualization, where Swivel’s early stage offerings are admittedly much more humble and simple than sophisticated projects like Many Eyes.

Also, frankly, I was surprised and dismayed to find out that the topic of putting “sophisticated visualization techniques in the hands of lay users” was even a controversial one. While the overwhelming sentiment in the room was pro-democratization, there was some tense internal community introspection happening there that, in all honesty, made me relieved to be an outsider. While this sort of question may seem interesting as a hypothetical, it is a non-issue when you are actually hammering out a product in a competitive market. Or, rather, the question changes to an imperative: design for simplicity while maintaining expressivity. Low floors, high ceilings, etc.

Tomorrow afternoon Sara and I are heading to Sacramento for the InfoVis conference, where I’m participating in a panel on The Impact of Social Data Visualization alongside Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda Viega, and Ola Rosling. I’ll be representing Swivel, in particular our market driven approach to data sharing, collaboration and visualization, and emerging topics of data ownership and provenance, privacy, and so on.