A couple of weeks ago Sebastian Heycke interviewed Mike Migurski (Director of Technology) and Tom Garden (Interaction Designer) from Stamen Design about their upcoming workshop for Adaptive Path’s UX Week. 
Stamen has established a reputation for creating compelling interactive design and data visualization projects. Their most recent success was the Oakland Crimespotting Project, which is an interactive map of crimes in Oakland, and a better way of understanding crime in cities.
Sebastian: Is there some sort of underlying principle that you try to convey with every Stamen project that you undertake?
Mike: I think there are definitely a few principles that connect everything; the idea of showing everything, I think is one. We try to just get it all out there; not to editorialize off the bat, but just put every single point on the map or put every single data in the display. We try to start from a position of great abundance and information, to show the vastness or the liveness. I think live, vast, and deep is some of the terminology that we’ve been using lately in a lot of our talks. I think that would probably be the most important sort of binding principle. A secondary one would a sense for choosing problems well.
Sebastian: I would like to talk a little bit more about the Oakland Crimespotting project. Could you explain how you came up with the idea, how you approached it, and what your intention was?
Mike: It came out of a degree of frustration with the way that the Oakland Police Department currently communicates their crime statistics information. I started the project as a personal experiment over winter break a year and half ago. Just kind of looking through their information. Trying to see whether it could be extracted or chopped or minced in some way. They have a fairly limited web presentation for the staff and it’s difficult to get a sense of what’s going on around your house. We started with the idea of trying to figure out whether that information could be turned into a more web friendly format. Later everybody else got involved and it became more of an information design and an interface design problem.
Tom: I came to the project really quite late on. Mike had been collecting that data, and it’s about his hometown. He knew a lot more about whether the data was relevant and what stories it was telling. There were also a series of experiments that Mike did on his blog to start teasing out particular stories from the data, thinking about metaphors for explaining the passages of events through time and how you might present crimes like serious assault or murder in a way that doesn’t take away from them but also doesn’t try and hide them behind layers and layers of interface. As a third party presenting that data we don’t have anything really to hide. Mike has some personal pride about Oakland. He doesn’t want to make it look bad but we don’t have any problem showing everything from the last month or all of the murders in one month. That’s what I found most interesting about the project.
Sebastian: What makes your information visualizations so successful and in what direction do you want to push it?
Tom: I think some of our most successful projects have tackled live data. It is about finding some structure to collect the different variations of the data over time and get a picture of what’s happening at that moment. I think that’s going to be the secret with live visualization. That’s what made the Digg Labs project successful. It is not just interactive, it’s live.
Mike: Things that would be considered really bizarre or adventurous a year or two ago are now becoming fairly commonplace as people get more accustomed to them. You get used to the idea that things can be moved and dragged. When you think about how mapping online changed when Google Maps was released. The main thing that they introduced wasn’t a particular technology, it was just the expectation that you could drag the thing. That’s something that we now use in almost all of our map-based projects, which we didn’t before.
Sebastian: What are you going to cover in your upcoming workshop for UX Week?
Mike: We’ve come up with a loose framework for how we deal with projects. We’re going to convey the chronology of that in the workshop. We’ve got three hours and what we’ve noticed in our work over the past couple of years is that our projects very frequently tend to fall in three phase processes so we’re dividing up the workshop into three chunks.
The first one is all about exploring information. That first portion of the project where you get a giant raw dump of information or you come into bucket loads of crime information or transit information. What are the tools, processes, and questions that we bring to just understand what it is that we have in front of us.
The second portion is about taking that exploration and figuring out what you actually want to do with it. During a project we did with a US residential real estate company, we decided that mapping the construction date of homes around the country was the particular thing we wanted to focus on. That second part is really about building the product.
There’s always this month at the end where you think you’re done but really you’re making some of the really important decisions concerning polish, detailing, and applying a veneer of believability and stability to the piece.
Sebastian: Thank you very much for this conversation!
Register for UX Week to see Mike’s and Tom’s workshop by June 30th to get the early bird price. And even better, use code BLOG when you register for an additional 10% off.
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