Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Interact with the vast universe of data

Being involved lately in the planning of a research institute with a focus on data and search has made me more aware and fascinated by really large sets of data. It is amazing how fast we (humans) are creating enormous amounts of data. Sensors are automatically producing dynamic and streaming data flows. From an interaction point of view this is exciting. These vast amounts of data becomes the material we (users) want to engage with, interact with, reach and manipulate, touch and sense. The challenge is to find interactive approaches that let us in an intuitive and productive way interact with this growing universe of data. Interaction design has to accept the challenge posed by the new world of digital data - the bitpool. Do we want to search the data, explore it, browse, or how do we want to relate to the material - to the bits? There is room for new thoughts, new ideas, new visions, new theories.

3 comments:

Chris Baggott said...

Excellent. leveraging data is the key to success for all organizations. What is the goal or the institute and where will it be located?

Anonymous said...

Hi Chris

Yes, this is an exciting development. The institute is "owned" by the School of Informatics in collaboration with a number of interested companies. The actual institute space will be located here on campus.

Erik

Anonymous said...

I've been thinking about this issue in the context of several of my projects...The idea of interacting with bits inverts the idea of interacting with traces (a la Bruno Latour - scientists don't work with DNA, they work with blobs on a gel that get transmuted into what we understand as DNA). Does the idea of interacting with bits go even further then in disaggregating our interactions from the objects that we purport to interact with?

Just musings for a morning...