This afternoon I attended the Yahoo Design Expo, a collection of projects from students engaged in new media/media arts/interaction design at various universities.
Most of the exhibits were interesting, but only one presenter really shone through as One to Watch: Aaron Koblin. A student at UCLA, he showed two works that demonstrated amazing promise:
The Sheep Market – exploiting Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, he collected 10,000 drawings of “sheep facing left.” It’s silly, weird, and brilliant.
Flight Patterns – using FAA data about a single day’s set of flights, Aaron generated a visualization of airplane movement that is reminiscent of Stamen’s Cabspotting — though on a much larger scale.
Make sure to download the large Quicktime movie, “Overview Documentation”. So good.
