Writing

ACM Creativity & Cognition 2009

Passing along a call for the ACM Creativity & Cognition 2009. Sadly I’m overbooked and won’t be able to participate this year, but I attended in 2007 and found it a much more personal alternative to the more enormous ACM conferences (CHI, SIGGRAPH) without losing quality.

Everyday Creativity: Shared Languages and Collective Action
October 27-30, 2009, Berkeley Art Museum, CA, USA

Sponsored by ACM SIGCHI, in co-operation with SIGMM/ SIGART [pending approval]

Keynote Speakers

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Professor of Psychology & Management, Claremont Graduate University, USA
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin
Director, Allosphere Research Laboratory, California Nanosystems Institute, USA
Jane Prophet
Professor of Interdisciplinary Computing, Goldsmiths University of London, UK

Call for Participation

Full Papers, Art Exhibition, Live Performances, Demonstrations, Posters, Workshops, Tutorials, Graduate Symposium

Submission deadline: April 24, 2009
For more information and submission process see: www.creativityandcognition09.org

the way things work and cognition 2009Creativity is present in all we do. The 7th Creativity and Cognition Conference (CC09) embraces the broad theme of Everyday Creativity. This year the conference will be held at the Berkeley Art Museum (CA, USA), and asks: How do we enable everyone to enjoy their creative potential? How do our creative activities differ? What do they have in common? What languages can we use to talk to each other? How do shared languages support collective action? How can we incubate innovation? How do we enrich the creative experience? What encourages participation in everyday creativity?

The Creativity and Cognition Conference series started in 1993 and is sponsored by ACM SIGCHI. The conference provides a forum for lively interdisciplinary debate exploring methods and tools to support creativity at the intersection of art and technology. We welcome submissions from academics and practitioners, makers and scientists, artists and theoreticians. This year’s broad theme of Everyday Creativity reflects the new forms of creativity emerging in everyday life, and includes topics of:

  • Collective creativity and creative communities
  • Shared languages and Participatory creativity
  • Incubating creativity and supporting Innovation
  • DIY and folk creativity
  • Democratising creativity
  • New materials for creativity
  • Enriching the collaborative experience

We welcome the following forms of submission:

  • Empirical evaluations by quantitative and qualitative methods
  • In-depth case studies and ethnographic analyses
  • Reflective and theoretical accounts of individual and collaborative practice
  • Principles of interaction design and requirements for creativity support tools
  • Educational and training methods
  • Interdisciplinary methods, and models of creativity and collaboration
  • Analyses of the role of technology in supporting everyday creativity

The Berkeley Art Museum should be a great venue too.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009 | creativity, opportunities  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.