Perry

Hewitt

Tag: arts

  • How to visualize interconnections

    MOMA has a terrific visualization as part of a show on Inventing Abstraction that opened back in December 2012. Visualization projects that map interconnections become complex quickly in a number of ways:

    • Content for each subject: How much should you display? This seems like the right amount, although there’s something hilarious about seeing Picasso’s interests reduced to an all-caps summary: GUITARS, MODELS, CUBISM, SUMMERS IN CATALONIA
    • Content that informs the connections: What’s the data source for these? Who relates to whom? How closely? How do you display relative strength of relationships, if at all?
    • Overall user experience: How will users know what to do? Where to start? Is the story that is emerging the one you started out telling?
    • Movement: What’s too sensitive? What’s not sensitive enough?
    • Technology: How can this work everywhere you need it to? This is mostly a solved technical problem, but not trivial in a world of proliferating devices. Will this ever be projected? What’s the level of accessibility required?
    • Flexibility: Depending on the life of your product, how do you handle new data about relationships? What’s the governance process for change post launch?

    Information aesthetics also points to a great three-minute movie made about the mapping process which gets to the complexity under the hood here.

    Reviews of the show overall can be found in The New Yorker and The New York Times, but only the latter of these mentions what struck me immediately in the visualization — the unusually large number of women represented as creators and not only subjects of an artistic movement.

  • How are arts orgs wrangling digital?

    How is the digital explosion affecting arts organizations? Last week, a Pew Internet report revealed the current digital focus of arts orgs, and what they identify as emerging opportunities and costs. Unsurprisingly, 99% have a web presence and many struggle with the time and expertise cost of social media. A few other findings that leapt out:

    • a full 97% have a presence on social networks and 45% post at least once a day
    • the “brand champion” strategy of having patrons help manage negative comments on social media is working for many
    • widely varied audience use cases (e.g., older/younger patrons divide on social media) creates need to support traditional alongside new media outreach
    • 20% have reprimanded employees over content shared online, which speaks to tensions between employees’ right to freedom of expression and the organizational needs for confidentiality and appropriate, public behavior (if this isa tension in publicly-funded arts orgs, what does this look like for banking?)

    One opportunity that stood out was the sizeable gap between adoption of websites (99%) and social presences (97%) and that of mobile apps (24%).

    Certainly, not every arts org needs a native application, but if I were working on a low-cost SaaS mobile solution with ecommerce baked in, arts organizations would be on my target list.