Visualizations of Our Collective Lives
S. Joy Mountford, Osher Fellow, Exploratorium

NOTE:

Throughout her talk, Joy frequently refers to design artifacts shown in her slides. We recommend following along in the slides as you listen to the audio. You can follow along manually here or view the synchronized slideshow available from CHI Conversations.

Original Announcement

The lines between art, design, and information are dissolving as we experience new places and objects. Consider, for example, the organic flow of air traffic over North America at daybreak, the bursts of search query memes spreading around the globe, and the pointillist surge of mobile phone usage on New Year's Eve. Using the new techniques of generative data visualization, a new generation of artist/designers/engineer/scientists are creating gorgeous, dynamic experiences driven by massive sets of data about our own lives. Their work comes to life in architectural spaces, on walls of wood and metal and light and shimmering glass clouds suspended overhead. Of course it must be touched to be appreciated and engaged with, simple gestures launch a thousand images and possibilities. Many of these projects have received international recognition. They are primarily 3D applications that can run in real time, but really can only be appreciated by watching them, as movies. These data movies aim to make information easier to understand while being enjoyable to watch. Surprising insights surface through looking at our 'data life' in new ways, and may compel us to design in different, even better ways.

Joy Mountford has been designing and managing interface design efforts for over 25 years. Her experience encompasses a range of innovative and pioneering interface developments on various user systems, including airplanes, PCs, and consumer electronics. At Interval Research Corporation she led a series of musical development projects for over five years. She was the creator and manager of the highly-acclaimed Human Interface Group at Apple Computer for nearly eight years. Joy has worked at MCC, an A.I. computer consortium, and she designed advanced user interfaces for military avionics systems at Honeywell.

(Ab)using Identifiers: Indiscernibility of Identity
Ben Gross, Doctoral Student, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

NOTE:

You can follow the slides as you listen to the audio. You can follow along manually here or view the synchronized slideshow available from CHI Conversations.

Original Announcement

People segment aspects of their everyday lives to manage their time, impressions, and relationships. Much of modern electronic communication hinges on digital identifiers--email addresses, instant messenger IDs, usernames, domain names, URLs, phone numbers, and social network IDs. These identifiers are increasingly relevant in shaping how we wish to present ourselves to others and how they present themselves to us.

Issues of privacy, security, and usability are intimately intertwined with our identifiers in ways we take for granted. What we think is reasonable, commonplace, or even possible in terms of protecting or violating online privacy shifts constantly. Recent developments in tools and techniques for tracking online behavior with Flash cookies and HTTP cache-control headers combined with advances in techniques to identify individuals from supposedly anonymized data sets should cause us to reevaluate what is possible.

Ben Gross is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois completing his dissertation on the tensions between social, technical, and policy constraints in online identifiers and namespaces. In short, he spends a lot of his time thinking about identity management. He writes for Messaging News on topics related to messaging, social software, collaboration, security, and other bright shiny objects. He has worked on identity management for both Google and Microsoft, as a researcher for the Highlands Group, and as an analyst for Ferris Research. Previously, Ben was a visiting scholar in the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley while working for the National Science Foundation on the Digital Libraries Initiative.