Hasta La Ideas

GPS-enabled experiments visualize daily jog data in 3-D

Potential Prefontaines aside, most who run would be hard-pressed to find any grace or beauty in our daily jogs. And yet that’s exactly what Nike+’s latest collaboration with interactive design firm YesYesNo accomplishes. Over two stunningly beautiful days on Nike’s campus in Beaverton, Oregon, YesYesNo collected data from several runs (mine included), plotting them in a three-dimensional scale. The graphs incorporated speed, distance and acceleration, but also color and texture.

YesYesNo’s projects range in size from the very large (i.e. the size of a building) to the very small. For example, the EyeWriter Initiative—in conjunction with the Graffiti Research Lab—tracks the movements of an eyeball in order to splash huge swathes of color and shape across buildings yards away. In this case, the whole of Nike’s campus was to be our canvas.

“Imagine you were going to go on a run with a giant paintbrush strapped to your back,” YesYesNo co-founder Zachary Lieberman tried to explain as we prepared to start our run. Strapping on GPS-enabled sportwatches, we went on brisk jogs around the campus.

Once back (and showered), Lieberman and cofounder Theo Watson plugged in the data from our watches into computers. Once the data loaded, we were able to manipulate the color, texture and size of the images and rotate them on a 3-D axis. After saving the final result, we could do anything with the graphic created—print it on posterboard, or even laser-etch it on the top of a shoebox.

While the project is a long way away from commercial application (when we asked Nike+ about it, they said that that conversation hadn’t even started yet), “The idea is that you take these tools back to your own cities and start collecting data wherever you are,” said Lieberman, the self-described “nerd artist.” If getting healthier isn’t enough of an incentive to stick to your daily jogs, perhaps creating artwork out of your efforts will be.

UK-based Luke Twyman’s Whitevinyl recently released Solar Beat—a music box looped using the orbital frequencies of our own solar system. It’s one of those simple concepts where astrophysics is translated into a pleasing ambient loop soundtrack more profound than your average web diversion.

Still relatively obscure, the multi-talented illustrator, photographer, web developer, musician behind the band Neverest Songs continues to fly beneath the radar despite some rave reviews.

Oh, and while it may take 248 “earth years” for Pluto to chime in, it’s totally worth it.

In their new book “
Cartographies of Time,” Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton dissect and track the methods people used when attempting to record the passage of time. These timelines, lists and antiquated infographics reveal particular attitudes and novel approaches to documenting history.

Rosenberg and Grafton organize Cartographies, naturally, in chronological order, tracing the earliest timelines from ancient Greece all the way to modern reinterpretations. Expertly showing the evolution of the form, the book’s fascinating swathe of cartographic imagery will appeal to history buffs and data visualization fans alike.

The central dilemma these historians and chronologists faced over the centuries was to decide what was important, and—the central theme of Chronologies—the myriad methods employed to illustrate and recreate those histories.

Scrolls, winding roads, columns representing centuries, trees and more visual aids are precisely recorded in Cartographies. One of the more resourceful, Johannes Buno, used animals and other inventive images to capture the spirit of a century. Relying on symbolism rather than scholastic precision to recreate a moment in time, in the process Buno helped redesign and redefine the timeline.

One of Buno’s inheritors, present-day artist Katie Lewis, revamped the body as a timepiece in her 2007 work “201 Days.” In it, she used pushpins to represent significant “sense events” and connected them together with red thread. The result is a precise yet jumbled representation of Lewis’ bodily experiences.

Rosenberg and Grafton look at other such ingenious methods, including crank scrolls like medieval film, rivers covered in dates and children’s games. There are also the many histories, or versions of history, they discover, like the Natural History Museum’s spatial exploration of the earth, one of the first timelines from sixth century France, and transcendentalist Elizabeth Palmer’s paint-by-numbers.

Rosenberg and Grafton joyfully unravel these jumbled histories into a clear, straight line. Pick up their book from Amazon or Chronicle.