Food patterns

Food trends come and go. Some stay longer than expected, and others come back a certain time every year. With their new project, The Rhythm of Food, Google News Lab and Truth & Beauty explore these patterns through twelve years of search trends.

As shown above, you get a circular timeline for each topic. Color represents the year, and distance from the center of the circle represents search volume. You can see the trend play out for each using a play button, or you can mouse over at the top to look at a specific year.

Fun stuff.

There are also a lot of thoughtful design touches that you might notice. A few off the top: annotation for the more trendy foods, notes for holidays or specific events that relate to the topic you view, and segments sized for area as you move from the center of the circle to the edges to compensate for visual attention.

Search and browse 195 food and drink topics. It looks like there’s a whole lot of peppermint and hot chocolate going on this time of year.

Tags: , ,

Wind prediction and potential power

Project Ukko

As we use up current energy resources, it grows more important to look to alternative energy sources. Wind is one potential area, but the problem is that one has to know where it's windy enough — now and in the future — to justify the cost of building the structures to harness the energy. It's freakin' wind, and variability is all over the place.

Project Ukko is an effort to make wind research predictions accessible to those who need such information. The visualization component by Moritz Stefaner, in collaboration with Future Everything and BSC, shows a number of wind factors around the world.

Lines on the map represent three things at once. Opacity shows the strength of prediction based on historical data, width represents wind speed, and angle plus color represents predicated change in wind speed. Select any line for more information on a specific area, which includes a range of possible outcomes instead of just a worthless mean or median.

Really nice, and I imagine it should be quite useful for those in the wind industry. For the rest of us, it's fun to look and poke at.

Summary of the project in the video below:

Also, find out more on Moritz's design process on his site. [Thanks, Moritz]

Tags: , , ,

Data Cuisine uses food as the medium

Unemployed

Ditch the computer screen for your data. It's all about the food. Moritz Stefaner and prozessagenten, process by art and design ran a second round of the Data Cuisine workshop to explore how food can be used as a medium to communicate data. Naturally, you've got your basic visual cues, but when you introduce food, you open lots more possibilities.

[W]e have all kinds of sculptural 3D possibilities. We can work with taste — from the basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami to complex combinations or hotness. There is texture — immensely important in cooking! Then we have all the cultural connotations of ingredients and dishes (potatoes, caviar, …). We can work with cooking parameters (e.g. baking temperature or duration). Or the temperature of the dish itself, when served!

The above shows piece of bread shows youth unemployment in Spain. See more data dishes here.