Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

I’ve been working for a while on this project with Stem Cell Resources for the new cell exhibit at the Maryland Science Center. The exhibition, including the Stem Cell Map and some other fun interactive works, opened yesterday and was received very well. If you’re in Baltimore its worth checking out. Developing this project has a been a great opportunity to do some great educational work with some great people. I enjoy being able to maintain a connection with the sciences despite focusing myself on art, and I always love creating data visualizations.

The Map is scripted in Actionscript 3 and takes all the data from an xml file exported from a spreadsheet making it easy to update. The research is broken down into three categories and each location is colored accordingly and scaled based on the number of facilities. It’s displayed on a large touchscreen in the exhibit and will also soon be online.

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Most of the time I have been dedicating to working with Processing has recently been taken up by a larger project. It’s been very exciting for me, but less conducive to blogging both because it’s a larger project, and because I’ve been doing a lot of learning for the project. The piece is an interactive map for an upcoming exhibit for the Maryland Science Center and will be on a large touchscreen. It’s a great project for me as I love data visualization and science.

The application is scripted in Action Script 3. I was originally thinking of using Processing, but I wasn’t happy with how it was handling some things i needed it to do. So far I’m very happy with the choice. Flash is quite a tough beast to work with but I’m impressed with how quickly it parses the sizeable xml file with all the data and also how smoothly it renders all the graphics. I’ve also had to do quite a bit of learning about xml. With a bit of work I have the flash file reading xml directly exported from a spreadsheet editor, making it very easy to be updated.

I’ll write more when the project is finished. I still have to do some work building the interface and making the interaction a little more fluid. The applet will also be available online as well as in the exhibit. For now here are a few images of other visualization methods I’ve been playing with.

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