Statement of Intent: Project Outline
Inspired by the development in Geo-tagging and the ability to track geographically peoples movements in the real world, made me start thinking about peoples journey’s across the web. As participants use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, or use Google to make a web search, their visits are tracked and logged, much like a digital footprint. In fact many data visualisation projects are being developed around this type of data.

Additionally based on my interests in Interaction Design and the User Experience, I have been exploring the Gestalt theories and my research led me to the project ‘Identitat: The Gestalt of Digital Identity’ the bachelor thesis of Jonas Loh and Steffen Fiedler.

“Today almost everybody has at least one digital representation on one of the numerous social communities, like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace. We create these profiles to express ourselves, find friendship, connection and gain reputation…We don’t imagine how she or he looks like, but think of specific personal data (images, videos, texts) which we associate with that person instead. ”

In Identitat, sculptures have been produced to express how an analogue snapshot of complex digital identities can be presented. Consumerist (amazon), communication behavior (twitter), interests (delicious) and listening habits (last.fm) were saved in a custom database of eight people in order to produce the data for these sculptures.

Following on from the idea of presenting a digital identity or in the case of this project, digital DNA in an analogous format, my idea would be to represent the data collected in this project and output the visualization as an image suitable for printing onto T-shirts, canvas etc. Thus creating a very unique portrait of a person’s digital life.

Technical Authorship
Using generative code to visualize data sets I plan to experiment using Processing or possibly NodeBox to illustrate peoples responses to a simple questionnaire about their online habits as well as their real-time environment eg the time of day, their location. The image produced would therefore be different everyday.

Resulting images can be printed or saved to be used on T-Shirts, canvas or simply as a profile picture on Facebook or Twitter. I would also like to document the various images via Flickr and I also plan to use networks such as Twitter, Facebook and a blog to promote this project.

Keeping to a questionnaire format and visualising the data keeps the project simple yet effective, with some interesting images, I hope!

Other sites of inspiration:

Fluid Forms, Your Unique Designs – Be creative and help a fluid form to embody and reflect your personality, memories or dreams. Through the emotional involvement you can bring to fluid forms, you can also become the creator of emotionally engaging, personalized and truly unique gifts.

News Knitter – a data visualization project which focuses on knitted garments as an alternative medium to visualize large scale data.

Urbansphere Wearables - aims to reflect the mood of the city by utilizing the data streams of social networks as a source of fashion design. As every online inhabitant of the city becomes a part of this production, the project brings online data to the streets, creating an ongoing interaction between the real and the virtual existence of the urban life.

Social Bits – Research on artistic output of social interactions.

ToDo, Interaction Designers – some fantastic projects using generative code for product design “we focus on dialogue, exchange and community through the integration of ideas, interactivity and technology”

Virtual Revolution – Over the last 20 years the web has changed the world, but what, if anything, has it done to us? Take part in a unique experiment to discover the impact the web is having on our brains, and discover which species of web animal you are.