"Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must 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."
Matt Woolman
Digital Information Graphics
Goal
VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.
Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.
About the author
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, nominated by Creativity magazine as "one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009", Manuel Lima is a Senior UX Design Lead at Microsoft Bing and founder of VisualComplexity.com - A visual exploration on mapping complex networks.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Manuel worked as a Senior User Experience Designer at Nokia and Senior Interaction Designer at the leading digital agency R/GA. He holds a BFA in Industrial Design and a MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design, New York. During the course of the MFA program, Manuel worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in research projects for the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency.
Manuel is a leading voice on information visualization and a frequent speaker in conferences and schools around the world, including TED, Lift, OFFF, Reboot, VizThink, IxDA Interaction, Royal College of Art, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, ENSAD Paris, University of Amsterdam, MediaLab Prado Madrid. For a complete list of talks, click here.