Last week, Katy suddenly told us she was going to Hollywood. She picked up a glamorous looking suitcase, and was gone.
Anyone who writes about the American novelist Joyce Carol Oates mentions her productivity. Since 1963, when she at age 25 came out with her first collection of short stories, Oates has published over 120 books. Stephen King, also known for his productivity, has a mere 75 to his name.
Last week, Katy and I went to see Mark talk about Interaction in Data Visualization at Boston CHI.
On February first, Chris appeared at work with a clean face. He told us that this was the beginning of a charity stunt. Chris had joined a group of men who would shave, then grow, then partially shave again to raise funds for Community Servings, an organization that make meals for Boston’s ill.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been building two interactive installation pieces for the lobby of GE’s headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. The pieces are part of the GE Works campaign, which describes and organizes the company’s work with four verbs: Powering, Curing, Building, and Moving. Our job was to show how data can illustrate these first two activities.
...so we thought we'd ask some of our friends about their favorite colors.
What's the biggest issue with U.S. energy use? This summer, after Katie Peek at PopSci asked us for a new take on the energy flow chart from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we talked about which angle to make the most important.
“Unprecedented” is a popular word in PR. Lots of things want to be unprecedented, few are. But last year’s hitting the population mark of seven billion was truly new. And just like how, for the past decade, a mild day in December or hail in July feels like a premonition of global warming, a transit hall on the day before Thanksgiving now quickly contains the association: there can be no more babies.
Sometimes you need to meet the right story to make your own work come alive. For Frankenfont, it was the idea of setting Frankenstein, the novel, in a font made out of misshapen parts scavenged from PDF files found online.
Graphic Design: Now in Production opened this weekend at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The exhibition captures the expanding role of the graphic designer. Ben's pieces Frankenfont and The Preservation of Favoured Traces are on display and we really want to go see it all. Check how fun it looks setting up.
When Arts for Hearts asked Chris to make something for their annual charity, we decided to elaborate on a previous sketch that Chris made for fun.
A few weeks ago, Slate launched "Top Right", a project "to identify the Americans who best share Edison's dual talents for inventiveness and practical thinking."
What does it mean to be one in ten thousand? If this was the incidence of, say, blue skin — am I likely to encounter a blue person in my lifetime? Would it happen once? Many times?
Katy always tries to steal the key to the third floor. How to stop her? With a key ring that's too big to fit in anybody's pocket of course!
Scientist and science writer Sam Arbesman just paid a visit and showed us his research on how and where innovation occurs. Sam draws from theories of scalability of cities, social network data, and experiments in cooperation to see how the number and quality of human connections affect innovation.
Sometimes friends visit the Fathom office to show us something nice.
We just launched TriTrack, a tool for triathlon training, on the behalf of GE and British Triathlon Elite Team Partner.
Mac Slocum, managing editor of O'Reilly Media interviewed Ben at the Where 2.0 conference.
Ben and Casey Reas made an art piece called “Signals” for building 76 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT):
Stats of the Union, our first iPad app, is built for GE as a tool to look at health stories in America.
Mark Schifferli, the latest addition to the Fathom team, turns out to be a two for the price of one hire. We were completely awestruck by the interests, style and aesthetic sensibility of Mark's six-year-old daughter. It's all we need to see. She's hired too.
Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn compiled a la hot list dei talenti for the Italian Rolling Stone special design issue.
Fathom and Harvard University are seeking a computational scientist to develop a visualization and analysis dashboard to track the emergence or reemergence of infectious diseases.
Marius Watz, curator of NODE10’s exhibition abstrakt Abstrakt - The Systemized World, recently invited Ben to participate. All Streets, a map of the United States made by marking nothing but the country's roads, is now up at the Frankfurter Kunstverein.
Ben recently spoke and gave workshops at UX Week in San Francisco. He talked about data and user experience: how to make data sets into storytelling.