open gov data poster (Dutch) >> page 1 page 2

open gov data poster (English) >> page 1 page 2
open gov data poster (Deutch) >> poster pdf
open gov data poster (Francaise) >> poster pdf

It gives me great pleasure to finally complete a design project i’ve been tinkering with for months, the “how to open government data(and how not to)” poster. It forms the last part of Ton Zijlstra and my research project on open government data for for the Ministry of Interior Affairs (Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties). Special thanks go to BUROPONY for the design of the poster and to Ot van Daalen from Bits of Freedom for filtering legal and judicial elements and the general flow.

The poster was intended to provide a lightweight and easy to understand visual explanation of the issues around open government data for civil servants. I set one design parameter, “let’s make it printable on most office printers”. At the same time, we wanted to release it for reuse hence the Creative Commons license. So if you are a civil servant reading this, print it out and put it up in a public place. Hopefully it will encourage a discussion which can reduce fear around the subject and help with a data census and important data sets getting published correctly.

The open data posters are currently available in English and Dutch as a PDF. If you want to translate the poster into another language, fire me an email and i can send you the source files.

Here’s a recent interview of me with Juha van ‘t Zelde of Non-Fiction. Looking forward to doing something cool with him at de Verdieping in exploring data flows, vizualization and the city. Control panels incoming, p2p all the way;)

Here’s an update on what i’m currently doing mainly for those of you that i don’t see that often.

1. Interaction Design and strategy work for .gov
I started work on a project with the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs. I’m working together with Ton Zijstra which is proving to be a pleasure. It’s all about making government data available in more accessible and reusable ways where possible. On the current list of what we’re delivering are a set of guidelines on how to go about doing this, (It’s gonna be a mixture of a cool flow-chart and explanation) plus a few examples of some government data that we’ve opened up. We’ll serve government data up in multiple formats, including an API. Alper will support this project code-wise (he’s already been hacking away at widgets that reuse gov data for some months, as well as doing an interesting mash-up with Kars in 2008).

The guidelines will aim to address any government worker or team asking the question “How do i open up some data?”. Hopefully we will translate this into English following our Dutch version. We’ll also fully document and make available the open government data examples and ideas for services that might ride on top of them too.

Alper and I recently visited GovCampUK in London which was inspiring again. Good to touch base with people like FutureGov, Open Knowledge Foundation, Rewired State and of course MySociety.

2. Less than a month till NARB launches on March 7
Tijs Teulings and I were fortunate to get funded back in September 2008 to develop NARB, a new software service (a web platform, an iphone app. and a mobile website) that helps people find and comment on art.

The good news is that we’re kinda almost there! Last week we did our first beta test at Museum van Loon. We’re doing another one this week and if you have an iPhone and want to join let me know.

We’re officially launching NARB at Rotterdam Museum Night, March 7.

Just spotted this work by friends over at nArchitects. They did this lovely light architectural piece made from string placed on the parapet of a French castle. More to be seen here.

This last weekend i arrived at my girlfriend’s house and as i walked in the door i noticed she had a box sitting on the stairs. It was sports monitoring gear to help her in the gym or running. It monitors your heart beat and then can create a series of workouts based on time. I tried it on and could get the watch to register the heart monitoring belt. I wanted just to see my beating heart registering on the watch screen. After pressing a few buttons, i was still unable to get my heart beat showing. Pissed off i scanned through the manual which was complicated with no entry on “press button to see heartbeat”. Perhaps i am stupid user, or perhaps the kit was just too complicated. What i would like is my heartbeat delivered to me all the time.

All the time. Yes, all the time. Why do i want a continual stream of data that contains my heartbeat? Well, after discovering heartbeat sensor technology, it dawned on me that there is presently a distinction between autonomous body data and that produced via cognitive processing(taking pictures, writing text, saving links, search, responding in speech). The data feeds that we have only very recently been able to create are in 99% of occasions processed via the brain. Where is the body? When was the last time you had to remind yourself to breathe?

The obvious choice for a body feed or bleed, would be the heart. We have reasonably cheap technology to measure it. Wait. It’s still locked up. Well sort of. A brief google later. Most heart monitoring kits (sensors and software) are embedded within medical or sports contexts . Only one company i found was porting this to the web, although there must be many more. I suspect that hospitals are using some kind of tool to record heat beat and blood pressure wirelessly. Will anyone help pipe us our heatbeats in a feed format? Sure it will need some hardware but please lets bring it out cleanly stripped from any specific context. Let’s see what people would do with that. It starts to get interesting when we overlay out heartbeat feed over the rest of our attention-stream. Hmm.

(thanks for the CC-Sharealike pics people split-milk radek reks rev dan catt)

Another pathway of experience design comes through the serving of food and is decanted via the evolution of restaurant cultures. The bleeding edge of cooking is a hive of sensory activity. The willingness and understanding of restaurant chefs to want to surprise and break assumptions, coupled with the abstraction and decoupling of flavor from its mother-form is providing for wild leaps of faith. New techniques and new tool kits have arrived thanks to chefs seeking out chemists and machine makers for collaborative benefit. Chefs can now embed flavor into materials not heard of before, while eradicating the separation of salt for maincourse and sweet for dessert. Foams, bubblebaths, gels, condensates, crunches never snowboarded before, hot and cold waves like physists seeking out new quantum materials. Environmentals like smoke or other textured or fragrant materials. The only remnants to an older time are the waiters. Surely more theatrical and narrative heavy experiences are soon to appear.

Biggest regret in my life so far: Having to turn down and stagiere position at El Bulli. (I could not get out of other committments…a painful lesson.)

Nevertheless, if i had done that then i would not be where i am now which i really can’t complain about. Actually i feel lucky to be able to work on fascinating projects with clients or together on collaborations with friends. Food has not left forever. Personally i would like to integrate the learnings from working with food and experience across to what i do now which is so similar. Here’s a promise to reengage with the sensory richness of food and theatre.

Video is of Alinea restaurant in Chicago, and you can take a look at their R&D here. El Bulli is located in Rosas, Spain.