This awesome talk by Patricia Ryan added to my confusion around language:

Design story: The Decanter from Landor Associates on Vimeo.



(thanks to Craig for sharing it!)

It was also very cool how easily visual images just appeared in our heads while listening to these short audio stories.

Here is a very powerful story by Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler:

And I walked …

and an awesome one by Eve Abrams:

Chain of Missing Links

Many more can be found on the website (which I’ll be visiting often), great for listening to get your mind off of things for 5-20 minutes at a time.

A beautiful talk by Elif Shafak.

“…communities of the like minded is one of the greatest dangers of today’s globalized world. And it’s happening everywhere, among liberals and conservatives, agnostics and believers, the rich and the poor, East and West alike. We tend to form clusters based on similarity, and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people. In my opinion, one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling. Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls.”

This photograph of the earth at night is a visualization of concentrations of artificial light. Someone didn’t design a visualization from a set of data, instead they captured or documented a situation that conveys the information.

Or, as Golan Levin talks about it in his TED Talk, “This is a photograph of the desktop of a student of mine. And when I say desktop, I don’t just mean the actual desk where his mouse has worn away the surface of the desk. If you look carefully, you can even see a hint of the Apple menu, up here in the upper left, where the virtual world has literally punched through to the physical”. It’s another self generated visualization.

Or, Subway Lines by Meaghan Kombol visualizing the New York subway lines’ bumps and kinks. In her words “This is about the motion, within the locomotion of the New York City subway system. To document this, I attempted to draw a straight line, on a piece of paper, mid-journey, while riding each of the twenty-three of the New York City subway lines”. (From the book Speck by Peter Buchanan-Smith)

I wouldn’t say I learned a lot from being there (to be fair I was only there for half of the course), but I am glad I experienced it, and I am very glad that I got his books because they are beautiful.  One thing I really enjoyed was to see that the language in Tufte’s books are very true to the way he talks.

Here are some quotes and notes form my sketchbook:

La Fete (HD – 2010) from Malcolm Sutherland on Vimeo.

A lovely short video by Malcolm Sutherland, looking at people at a “La Fete Nationale” celebration in Montreal, Quebec. Combined with music by Kevin Kardasz, it’s people watching captured at it’s best.