NodeBox 3 Helsinki Workshop
We did a workshop at Aalto University - Finland - Helsinki from January 27 till January 31 2014. Participants were a selection of students from graphic design and media arts. The focus was on data visualization and on generative design.
Below are some of the final results.
Visualizing the disappearance of fish in the sea
I wanted to visualize the big change in a little over hundred years in the numbers of fish in the North Sea. To emphasize the dramatic drop in numbers, and to create a feeling of the movement of a big school of fish, I wanted to display my data with lots of lines instead of color blocks or two separate graphs. This was done with the link node which connected the separate lines to a shape I could manipulate. The finishing touches were added in Illustrator.
Population / Claire de Lune.
My main inspiration was an Illustrator script I saw years ago by [Hiroyuki Sato] (http://shspage.com/aijs/en/#dance) and wanted to create something similar in NodeBox, so I took one of my older illustrations and decomposed it to color palettes, and different shapes. Then I created a network of nodes that allow different transformations and combinations of those via dozen of randomized parameters, like width, height, sleeve length, hair style etc.
Smaller side-experiments included a crude dynamic grid-based type generator, a midi-file visualization (Clair De Lune by Debussy) and a grid-based painting tool.
Afghan War.
I thought it’d be interesting to work on a dataset so big that visualizing it would be impossible without the help from a program like Nodebox. I stumbled upon a large .csv file in which six years of war was recorded. In the end, the dataset proved to be a little too big, though, and the computer kept on running out of memory.
My end result is a graph portraying over 70 000 individual events that were registered by the NATO forces during the war in Afganistan. On the upper graph, the events are shown by location. The lower graph portrays a timeline running from the beginning of 2004 to the end of 2009.
Monster by Coincidence.
I am really into illustration and creating things out of materials given by coincidence. So I chose to take NodeBox as a tool to create a huge amount of shapes and forms, where I later on can make something new out of, e.g. monsters or little characters.
I went through a process of playing with shapes, randomly generated and created, tried to more and more randomize all the factors and variables that will influence my shapes.
These “body shapes” can now be created randomly and also be combined with already drawn or illustrated (body) parts so the result will be a little monster / creature.
Murder motives in India.
I received the data from the National Crime branch of India. The idea was to potray the numbers of murders and the reasons, for each state in India.
In most of the aspects Bihar was high on the list of homicide. To build it further I would like visualize data from year 2001 to 2012 and to put in a bit more character to the visualization to make the graphs more like blood splatters.
Animations.
i played with the animation function of NodeBox . it generate different patterns in a much easier way than in other software i’ve worked with. It’s really fun to play with NodeBox. for me it’s going to help a lot for my animation work in the future . i’d love to explore it more with my illustration and info visualisation too.