andreavaccari.com

The Disseny Hub Barcelona (aka the Design Museum Barcelona) opened this week with the exhibition Turisme: espais de ficció (Tourism: spaces of fiction), which explores the reality of the tourism industry and of the designers that plan it. The exhibition features a new urban demo developed by the MIT Senseable City Lab called Los Ojos Del Mundo (The World’s Eyes), led by Fabien Girardin and in collaboration with David Lu, which explores Spain through the eyes of the thousands of visitors that paid homage to the country in 2007.

The project builds on the advanced data mining algorithms developed by Fabien to study the georeferenced photos publicly available on Flickr and unveil the otherwise hidden dynamics that characterize the presence and flows of tourists, and their favorite destinations. Density-based clustering allows to identify the places that are most photographed, and thus most evocative, while network analysis of the links highlights how concentrated or widespread are the typical trips of locals and visitors.

One of the most interesting aspects of this project, however, was the design of a interface and a narrative capable of conveying such information in an informal way, easily accessible to the non-technical user. This too-often neglected task is in my opinion the stone key to establish an honest dialogue between researchers, practitioners, decision makers, and the end users on the significance of these information.

The project web site features a more detailed overview of the project, and high-res images and videos of the three main visualizations. In Unphotographed Spain, photos overlap to expose the most attractive places and in contrast their absence reveals the unphotographed spaces. Spaces of Activity compares the regions and cities that host memorable parties in Spain and the places that attract more quiet experiences through art. Finally, spaces of diversity highlights the contrast between where locals capture images and where visitors such as Britons experience Spain.

There are other compelling visualizations developed by the great David that focused more on the preliminary visual exploration of the data set and will be invaluable to further deepen our understanding of digital footprints. Among my favorite are this and this.