NodeBox 3 Warsaw Workshop

We found the best way to continue developing NodeBox Live is to expose it to new users and see how they use the software, where they stumble, and how we can improve.

Last week we organized a NodeBox Live data visualization workshop at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology.

This workshop was in collaboration with the Warsaw City Contact Center (better known by its hotline number 19115) who provided data on “non-urgent” notifications like garbage, road damage or broken trees.

All the data was provided through a uniform city API (in Polish) which provided much more information on themes such as environmental data, educational data, transportation information and more. Some of the data sets are really interesting, like a live feed of all buses and trams running through the city of Warsaw.

During the first two days we taught students how to use NodeBox Live: the basic principles of procedural graphics, how to work with data, and how to connect data points to a visual representation.

Workshops like these are a great opportunity to discover functionality that is useful for many users. During the workshop we developed nodes to easily fetch real-time JSON data, perform mapping from latitude/longitute to X/Y coordinates (using the d3-geo library) and manipulate imported data by adding or replacing columns.

We had some very enthusiastic students developing their ideas into visual experiments. Here are some of the works:

We would like to thank the Polish-Japanese Academy for hosting our workshops, especially Ewa Satalecka and Olga Wroniewicz.

We also want to thank the city of Warsaw for their cooperation and bringing us into direct contact with the developers when things weren’t working as planned.

If you’d like to know more about NodeBox Live, the upcoming web-based version of NodeBox, head over to our new website.