Geneva From its Social Network Activities

These past days I have been working with my Lift Lab colleagues on a pet project for Lift 10 that aimed at providing an unusual map of Geneva. Here is the spiel as posted on the project page Geneva From its Social Network Activities:

The Lift Conference series has covered several themes on the digitization of the contemporary cities. In 2009, Dan Hill argued that the way citizens and visitors live and feel the urban environment is beginning to be profoundly affected by new information layers. Carlo Ratti showed us new ways of sense making of this deluge of information through data mining and visualizations techniques. For this year’s edition, Lift Lab wanted to participate with a tangible contribution that leverage the emergence of new urban information layers.

We have been capturing the activity generated around various social networks (Flickr, Foursquare) in Geneva from the data available via these services API. Through data analysis and visualization techniques, we produced an interactive map of the city, revealing photogenic areas (e.g. the waterfront) with public places (e.g. Bains des Pâquis, Parc des Bastion) and events (e.g. Geneva Motor Show, Geneva Festival) people like to share online. The result shows these dynamic information layers with their spatial and temporal trends as invitations to explore or rediscover Geneva.

Snapshot of Geneva on May 4, 2010 (day before Lift10) revealing active places and their trends.

This kind of dynamic map exemplifies our recent investigations that leverage existing soft infrastructures (e.g. mobile phone networks, near-field communications, user-generated content) to create novel user experiences as well as refine the understanding of urban dynamics, mobility and occupancy levels. Over the years we have been engaged to produce techniques and prototypes for city governments (City of New York, Province of Florence), mobility service and infrastructure providers (Boeing, BitCarrier), mobile service providers (Orange R&D, Swisscom) and recently museum and exhibition managers (Le Louvre, Geneva Palexpo).

Why do I blog this: Besides prototyping something fun (and hopefully not frivolous), it was an opportunity to 1) refresh some of my pieces of code mixing R for data analysis, Java for data mining and back-end and AS3 for the front-end and 2) explore and experiment with new data manipulation techniques and R methods. Thanks to designer Maja Denzer for her informal advises at the beginning of the project. Here are the screenshots as testaments of the evolution of the interface.