TL;DR: We will no longer actively publish on Datavisualization.ch, as our focus has shifted from collecting visualizations to building them. This site will remain accessible as an archive. You can follow the work and thoughts of the people behind Datavisualization.ch on blog.interactivethings.com.
If you were an avid reader of Datavisualization.ch during the past years, you have experienced a decline in activity around here lately. And by lately I mean in the past year or so. It’s bothering me that I left this site lingering around. Even more so, as I failed to let you know what’s going on that holds me back from publishing more frequently.
Christian and I started to publish our thoughts and findings during our collaboration on our thesis project at the Interaction Design program of the Zurich University of the Arts back in 2008. After graduation, we broadened our scope and started to report news and document noteworthy projects created by others beside our own work. Our private research blog became Datavisualization.ch. It was our repository, our library, our diary. But more than anything, it was a place for us to engage with the community that creates this fantastic body of work that we observed and studied.
Over time, we’ve built up a vast collection of case studies that inspired, educated, and motivated us. But I don’t see it as a collection of just design projects. I see it as a collection of ways to look at our world. A set of lenses through which we can explore and observe the things around us. Other people created them, lend them to us and it’s free for us to pick them up and have a look on our own. I take great pleasure in picking up new lenses. Borrowing somebody else’s perspective to understand how she sees the world. To learn the things that she discovered when exploring the subject at hand.
That said, beside being a passionate observer, I am also fascinated by the opportunity to lend someone a new, a different perspective with my own work. Since I co-founded Interactive Things together with Christian and Jeremy, I got to do exactly this on a daily basis. And we don’t do it alone anymore. Over the past years, we’ve been joined in our practice by a fantastic group of talented designers and developers. My work became our work. It’s the result of a collaboration with blurring lines between a single person’s contribution. And it’s bigger than what a single person could have achieved.
My role changed during this transformation and growth. For the majority of our projects, I don’t write many lines of code. Neither do I put finishing touches on the vectors and pixels. I help bringing them to life by setting up the project team, directing the overall vision and strategy, guiding decisions about design and technology, or relaying communications. This role needs my full attention for most of my waking hours. And that’s fine. But this also means that I’m limited in how much time I can spend reviewing projects, books, or events. My acts of curation have shifted to leaner platforms like Twitter, Tumblr or Pinterest. There, I’m collecting and sharing a lot of the newly published visualization projects that spark my interest.
So, where do we go from here?
- Datavisualization.ch with all its content will remain accessible as an archive. So don’t worry about losing your bookmarks if you have any.
- I will still be actively using @datavis on platforms like Facebook and Twitter and remain available for anything exciting that you’d like to share with me.
- I will also remain available for speaking and writing engagements around the general topics of data visualization. Just reach out and I’m happy to discuss how I can help.
- My team and I will publish our insights, thoughts, and opinions from our research and practice on the studio blog of Interactive Things. You can follow us on blog.interactivethings.com.
- The popular Inside article series, where we explain the process behind our work, will continue on our studio blog. We will even migrate and re-release previous articles.
Thanks for reading and sharing.
Signing off,
–Benjamin
