I am always on the lookout for new and interesting visual representations of complex data and just discovered Death & Taxes, 2009: "is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected...
Posts related to: Art
Analyzing political debate
Political debates are heavily analyzed - by pundits and laypeople alike. I had my own minor visual contribution to this discourse through this WordMap/Cloud of the third and final debate between McCain and Obama . Such wordmaps are fun to create and see but are not...
We feel fine
We Feel Fine is a web-installation, "a self-organizing particle system," art project that is powerful and touching - building as it does on people's emotions, harvested from blog postings from around the world. As the designers say, "We hope it makes the world seem a...
APA & Torture
I had written previously (here and here) about the American Psychological Association's long connection with torture and other coercive information gathering techniques. I am still bothered by it. Today's NYTimes has a op-ed by Stanley Fish (titled Psychology and...
Natural v.s. Artificial Intelligence in Teaching
The field of educational technology is littered by attempts to replace the teacher by creating some kind of a technological learning system that would make the teacher redundant. All such attempts have failed. This has, however, not prevented people from trying. This...
Jared Diamond on creativity, innovation and wealth
Jared Diamond has an article on edge.org, somewhat provocatively titled: How to get rich? The question his after is simply, "what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation,...
Creativity, genius & age
Malcolm Gladwell has a great essay in a recent New Yorker on the relationship between genius and age. It is popularly believed that genius is often tied up with precocity. There are two aspects to this. First, creativity requires the energy and brashness of youth....
London Underground Map
One of my favorite pieces of design is the London Underground Map. It has been replicated all over the world - from Mumbai to Tokyo. Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to a BBC 4 video made in 1987 about this map. Check it out here Here is a link to the Wikipedia page...
On designing the body
Corpus 2.0 by Marcia Nolte is a set of seven portraits illustrating how the human body could adjust itself to the design of products, including a hole in the lips for smokers and an extended shoulder for holding a phone. Very strange and very interesting, check it out
Of games, mood and age
I love reading. I love watching movies. I love over-analyzing books and movies, seeking to find pattern and structure, motifs and motives. I love to break them down in my mind and put them back together again. I read reviews of books and movies by the ton, sometimes...
Representing me
Sharon Guan with the Instructional Design & Development Group at DePaul University has invited me to present at a faculty conference next April. I will be speaking about the manner in which new technologies are pushing us to blur the lines between the professional and...
When is a picture of a sandwich more than a sandwich?
The answer is that when that picture has been taken by someone you know and it ends up on the NYTimes Freakonomics blog! Long story short, a picture of a sandwich taken by Leigh Wolf has been used by the cool people over at Freakonomics to illustrate a story. Check it...
Why blog
Andrew Sullivan is one of my favorite bloggers, not because I agree with all that he says there is a certain sensibility that emerges as you follow his blog for a while that appeals to me. He has a great piece in The Atlantic Monthly titled Why I blog?. Speaking of...
WordMapping the debate
I created two WordMaps (using wordle.net) using all the words used by Obama and McCain during their third and final debate. Kind of interesting. Check them out (Click on the image for larger versions, hosted on Flickr). Wordle created using all the words used by...
The greatness of teachers
I discovered Hulu TV a few weeks ago and have been using it to catch up on previous episodes of The Daily Show. I decided today, as I was working on a presentation to watch Crawford. It is a documentary about "a small town thrust into big politics when George W. Bush...
Students video premiere on aftered.tv
This just in. Leigh Wolf just informed me that a video created by three of her students this past summer accepted by AfterEd - a web-based video channel produced by EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University. New content is published weekly, including news,...
Plagiarism, note to Root-Bernstein’s and Creativity Portal
Here are some emails (for the record) that I have sent recently to the Root-Bernstein's (the authors of Sparks of Genius) letting them know of how their intellectual property has been stolen by David Jiles, Ph.D. Details in my original posting: David Jiles, Ph.D.,...
Emailing a plagiarist
I am sending the following email to David Jiles, Ph.D. whose plagiarism I have documented in this posting: David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist. The email is as follows: Dear Dr. Jiles -- I have some questions and concerns about your book "Creativity and...
David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist!
I do not know who David Jiles, Ph.D. is. I do know that he is a plagiarist, an intellectual crook and a thief of the highest order! I do not write these words lightly. I was first informed of this by Mike Deschryver and have over the past few days attempted to look...
Ganapati 08, Photos
As un-official photographer for the Marathi Group, I took a bunch of pictures of this year's Ganapati celebrations. These are now (finally) on Flickr. Enjoy.
Political poetry
What do Donald Rumsfeld and Sarah Palin have in common? Turns out that they both deliver speeches that can, at be, without much effort, converted into poetry. Check out this and this. Some of them are quite briliant.
GeoGreeting!
I often do an assignment with my students where they go looking for letterforms in nature. Leigh Wolf just sent me this link to GeoGreeting.com which takes the same idea - but conceptualizes it on a global scale. Check out this example.
Drawing hands
Image says it all...
Incredible !ndia
Patrick Dickson sent me this link to an article on Boston.com titled Scenes from India. As the article says: India is home to over 1.2 billion people of wildly varying religions, cultures and levels of wealth.... Though there's no possible way for these images to be...
Picturing poetry
Nashworld pointed me towards PicLits a website that he describes as being "part visual literacy, part refrigerator poetry, part… fun." Check out his posting or visit PicLits.
Wong, Mishra, Koehler & Adams (2007)
Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Adams, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. To appear in M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press. Abstract:...
Ghee Happy
Sanjay Patel is an animator at Pixar and has come up with a beautifully designed book about Indian gods and goddesses. Check it out at his website, whimsically called GheeHappy. [You will need to go to the site FAQ to understand what that means.] The illustrations are...
The commodification of ugly
Noah, one of the students in my design doctoral seminar sent me this video by Ze Frank. Check it out.
Brilliant advertisement
I don't want to give anything away... watch it once and then once more... [Youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQbl1c63Ofo]
Defining design (one view)
I am on the Design Research Listerv and every once in a while a discussion rages online about the defining design. Gunnar Swanson (of the Gunnar Swanson Design Office and faculty at at East Carolina University) has created a flash movie that (as he says) "lays out...