The Intersection of Data and Design

One of the reoccurring themes through out data topics right now is data and design. Now more then ever because of a simple fact that we have so much data that really needs a visual ‘picture’ to make it more readable and understandable. With this there is a good focus on areas such as Data Visualization and Data Design.

Professor Mark Hansen, PhD of UCLA gave an interesting lecture called “The Intersection of Data and Design”

Find the lecture here

Brief Overview

On May 19, 2011, at The Intersection of Data and Design, UCLA Professor Mark Hansen spoke to educators about the possibilities of these hybrids with the arts. His talk covered a number of data-driven artworks (Listening Post and, at the New York Times Building, Moveable Type) and performances (Shuffle with the Elevator Repair Service) that provided examples of what work at “the intersection” looks like. In addition to teaching at UCLA, he has started a collaboration with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and is currently helping to design a portion of a computer science curriculum focused on having students generate and analyze data from their daily lives using mobile technology.

Hansen began his talk by contemplating how one might define a science of data, as opposed to statistics or math or computer science per se. Many of the data lessons he talked about in the LAUSD curriculum fall into a “between” field, one that has been labeled “data science.” Often, however, this term is applied in a somewhat vague way and tends to refer to the tools practitioners use rather than a set of principles. Hansen noted that there must be more to the discipline than that. After all, an astronomer is not characterized solely by her use of telescopes, no matter how important such tools are to her work.

After making a case for data science, Hansen shifted gears and presented some of the hybrid data/design works he’s been part of. Listening Post, a project involving the statistical parsing of text from chat rooms into oft-repeated thematic groups, is in some ways an instrumental arrangement of what people say through the chat medium, how they say it, and how it’s represented visually on hundreds of small screens and auditorily. Hansen observed that in some ways, the chat exhibited on Listening Post is a partial “response” to the “call” of current events, the news. In two subsequent projects, Hansen and his collaborator Ben Rubin created engaging displays from the text of the news. Unlike Listening Post, the “clean” nature of the news data offered new opportunities for both statistical and computational analysis that added depth to the works. (Source: NYAS)

About Mark Hansen

Mark H. Hansen is a Professor of Statistics and co-Principal Investigator of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also holds appointments in the Departments of Design | Media Art and Electrical Engineering. Hansen began his career at Bell Laboratories, and he has retained the focus on applications that he gained at Bell. Some of his current work centers on so-called “participatory sensing,” projects that engage the general public in non-professional practices of data collection and analysis. His tertiary education began with a BS in Applied Mathematics and his MS in Mathematics from the University of California, Davis. From there he moved on to the Department of Statistics at University of California, Berkeley, where he received his MA in 1991 and his PhD in 1994. Since 2002, when he left Bell Labs, Hansen has held research positions at UCLA. (Mark Hansen’s UCLA site)