IDIA 620: Information Culture - Design

Melda M. Washington

Information Culture, October 21, 2012

“Where Data and Design meet Food?!”

Overview

Introduction The Open Data Cooking Workshop Mashup Examples Conclusion

Introduction

Something different that tied: Information culture Data Design Mashup?

Information aesthetics - Where form follows data. www.infosthetics.com Open Data Cooking: Data Visualization that You Can Eat

The Open Data Cooking Workshop Imagine how a seafood soup would taste based

on local Baltimore fishing data How data can relate to cooking? 2 day workshop held in Helsinki. Pick two topics and four ingredients and find

relations. Make up a dish that could represent that subject. Brainstorming in groups and data hunting.

The Open Data Cooking Workshop Research on the representation of data with

culinary means. The workshop researches ways to represent

local data through the inherent qualities of food such as color, form, texture, smell, taste, nutrition, origin etc.

Participants translate data in to a sensual culinary experience

Participants gain insights into both media and learn about their inner creativity, associative thinking and imaginations.

At the end an open data menu will be created and publicly tasted.

Taste of migration

The amount of food on the plate corresponds to the number of people from that nationality who live in Finland

Each non-Finnish nationality is represented by a stripe of typical food from:

• Salmon for the Swedish

• Rice for the Chinese.

Happiness Cocktail

Personalized shrimp cocktail, representing not only the number of your facebook friends

Especially how many of them are smiling on their profile pictures.

• More rice = more friends

• More shrimp = more happy friends

Happiness Cocktail

Actual personalized shrimp cocktail, representing not only the number of your facebook friends

Criminal herring in fur coat

Represents Finland’s crime rates for 2011in a layered Russian salad

Each layer represents one type of crime

• Salted herrings • Potatoes and Carrots • Beets • Red onion • Eggs • Mayonnaise • Parsley and Dill The Russian name is "Selyodka pod Shouboy", that means "Herring under fur coat".

Tasty Tweets

A data visualization experiment that allows users to explore current twitter trends through taste.

Uses the Twitter API

Collects tweets containing mentions of specific fruits such as blueberry, pineapple, apple and carrot and creates a smoothie that represents the blend.

The smoothie is created based on the same proportions of fruits collected from the tweets.

Because twitter trends change quickly, each smoothie has a unique palette of flavors.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/42973460

Conclusion

This information culture allows us to represent data or information in creative and intriguing new ways.

We are only bound by our own creativity.

References

data-cuisine.net

ciid.dk/education/portfolio/idp12/courses/data-visualisation/projects/tasty-tweets/

www.infosthetics.com