Beautiful Data I Workshop > What Happened

A lot of people came to talk and think with us. Here’s some of our food for thought:

• David Weinberger talked about openness and institutions, providing case studies like Serendip-o-matic, StackLife, and LibraryCloud.

• Mark Schifferli and James Grady of Fathom showed us some visualization projects, including NikeFuel Weather Activity and 2013 Year in NikeFuel, annual reports for GE, and Scaled in Miles.

• Laura Kurgan of Spatial Information Design Lab led us through visualization projects like There + Here: Transnationalism and Migration, Port to Port, and Jumping the Great Firewall.

• David Small discussed challenges and opportunities in designing experiences in cultural institutions, using work in the Met American Wing and New-York Historical Society as case studies.

• Sherri Wasserman continued this conversation and drew from her work with Gapminder, the American Folk Art Museum’s Infinite Variety exhibition, and FIND (Forming Intersections & Dialogues).

• Rachel Binx talked about her projects Meshu and Gifpop.

• Suzanne Fischer of the Oakland Museum of California led a thoughtful conversation on community curating and pointed to examples like Hard Times in the OC and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum's Unfinished Business and work with the Conservative Vice Lords.

• Seb Chan of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum made us consider the possibilities for use of open museum collections and directed our attention to Cooper-Hewitt’s “Explore the Collection” page, the Museum Metadata Exchange, and surprising databases like 0xdb.

• Sara Hendren of Abler broadened our thinking about designing for diverse publics, pointing to work like SpokenLayer and Tastes of London as inspiration.

• A panel composed of Hanspeter Pfister, Ken Nakayama, and Bobby Pietrusko provided multiple viewpoints on visualization, drawing on work ranging from research on what makes data visualizations memorable to visualizations for The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 and How Wine Became Modern.

• Rahul Bhargava of the MIT Center for Civic Media got us playing with data and talked about his work with Data Therapy.