Crossing the Digital Divide!

In this post, we discover and applaud the brilliant digital designers out there who are crossing the digital divide, contaminating arts with design disciplines and utilising new mediums for digital expression.

I begin by featuring the amazing and multi-disciplinary design threesome, Troika. I just can’t wait to see Troika’s founders Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel showcase their stuff at the Design Indaba this year. Their creations have been self-described as “simple, playful and provocative technology driven, social interventions” and by another as “technological poetry”. Either way, it gets me totally inspired to see designers escaping pure print or web design in the form of installations that provoke and reflect, some of which find commercial application too.

Popular works of Troika include a giant flipdot cloud that reflects the colours of its environment created for British Airways’ luxury Heathrow lounge; park sculptures that amplify passers by whispers; an “electroprobe” that allows you to access the silent language of household gadgets, creating a big magnetic bubble that ripples to the words of electronic objects, and makes audible conversations that you have never heard before; guerrilla loudspeakers that read out text messages and a wonderful music box that plays a tune in response to torn museum tickets fed to it and more…

Troika’s ‘Newton Virus’ has finally released into the wild and ready for you to download from their web site! For those who don’t already know, the ‘Newton Virus’ introduces the magical concept of gravity to your desktop. Buy it here for a few dollars if you really love it.

Check out Troika’s fantastic book, Digital by Design.

A related area of design that is close to my heart is data visualisation, also referred to as information design. More and more information out there is being re-designed and visualised, and there is an abundant range of possibilities available. By simplifying data, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web, designers make the information more accessible, more appealing and, essentially, more readable. These functional designs make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans.

My favourites, to mention only a few, are Visual Complexity – a massive resource space designed to inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field and providing links to many projects; Marcos Weskamp’s active portal of innovative data design projects, Newsmap’s colourful visualisation of the most talked about news posts around the globe; and Digg Labs’ diggers stack (also downloadable as a screensaver) where popular stories across the net fall from above and stack into functional columns for easy reading.

Also, Number 27′s brilliant “We feel fine” project, now in book form, maps our global emotional status by drawing keywords such as “excited” or “depressed” from a astronomical database of blog entries into a create a colourful, visual emotional landscape representing the world’s “mood”, at that moment.