After working with a group of (mainly) autistic children for the last couple of weeks, it's really hit home to me just how important and useful graphic design can be to people . Some of the kids use a communication system called PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System) which basically involves showing pictures of items/things they want to communicate to a teacher or carer, in order to assist their verbal communication, or in place of it. Visual communication in the purest sense of the word, this process makes day to day life so much easier for these kids, and it also makes you think about how simple graphic design can often need to be.

Just read a very interesting bit on the age old 'form follows function' debate. instead of concentrating on the 'follows' aspect, the author (Jan Michl) has concentrated on the 'function' aspect of the dictum, and whether anything can really function without an already existing form. He raises some interesting points, particularly when looking at how in nature a form exists before any function is an issue:

"According to this theory, small incidental variations in the physical and behavioral makeup of offspring of the same litter produce variations in their ability to adapt to a particular habitat. The individuals that happen to be better adapted to the particular environment have more chance, through no effort of their own, to survive to adulthood and have offspring, which inherit the advantageous variations; these offspring in turn are exposed to the further pressure of natural selection. The specific habitat functions as the selecting factor, while inheritance accumulates the selected, i.e. advantageous, variations. In this way, in the course of generations, design-like adaptations slowly develop."

However, I still feel that the 'form follows function' expresses well an idea that all designers should work by, i.e. to design with the purpose of the object/ building/ image/ text in mind, and to include only aesthetic/structural features that will generally aid the usefulness of the finished article. It's an interesting read anyway!

here's the link - http://janmichl.com/eng.fff-hai.html

"These images are generated by evaluating and interpreting the 1997 music video “Mo Money Mo Problems” from the first disc of the Notorious B.I.G. album, Life After Death. The algorithm detects edges in the image and attempts to trace motion from frame to frame, using the initial frame as their starting point. The output is rendered as a vector image, the curves represent the motion. The points represent the pixels detected in the edge, their size determined by the distance from their previous location, the further, the larger the circle. The color and location of the points are determined by the corresponding pixel in that frame. The bright colored track suits worn by Puff Daddy and Mase in the dark backgrounds make for good tracking and nice color combinations."

http://nickhardeman.com/blog/?p=244

An example of an entirely aesthetic use of data visualization. This is the sort of thing that seems to get far more attention than other much more useful applications of mapping data, pretty much just because it looks cool. It has no real relevance to the origins of the data (the biggie video), and you can't get any information back from it. The complete other side of beauty vs. functionality - looks good but has absolutely no functional use.

GPS mapping in Lisbon

This caught my eye recently, as I've been looking into how design can help us understand otherwise abstract or complex concepts or data.
Put simply, GPS was used to track 1534 cars travelling around Lisbon, Portugal, during October '09, and the GPS coordinates and velocity of the vehicles gathered over the month is condensed into one single virtual day, grouping the data by second and displaying it as an animation. you can see one of the stills, and a link to one of the animations.
With positive applications for traffic control, policing, town planning etc., this kind of mapping is obviously helpful, but I think there are far greater and more varied applications for this kind of link up of technology and design, and I intend to find them.

Traffic in Lisbon – emphasis on sluggish areas from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.