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Time in Place clock project measures human activity at Pike and Broadway

Screen Shot 2013-06-04 at 2.31.35 PMLast week, CHS featured a map showing the hive-like motion created by marking the start and endpoints of thousands of Car2Go trips in the city. Here is an even more Capitol Hill-focused visualization of human activity in the urban environment.

8952006797_abe748b2af_bThe Time in Place project “grabs traffic camera data feeds” and creates a pulsing “clock” showing the ebb and flow of activity at a specific point. “The project was developed to visualize activity on Capitol Hill at the intersection of Pike and Broadway and then radially graphing this data into an abstract, minimalist design,” creator Loren Judah tells us. Someday, Judah and co-creator Mario Rosasco hope to expand the system to cover cities “all over the world.”

For now, here’s an explanation from Judah — you can see the clock in motion here and the camera that is driving it on the CHS Traffic Cam page.

So if you’re looking at the clock and see the red color spike way out and away form the clock at 8:00 am you’ll know there was a lot of activity there at that time. Also, if you see the graph dip into the clock and within the median, you’ll know that there was less activity at that hour than there was the day before. All of our data is compared to the previous day’s activity to give us what is in actuality, 48 hours worth of information displayed on a deceptively minimalist graphic design.

The full explanation from Judah is below:

We set out to design a way of interpreting large amounts of activity in a minimalist design fit for a gallery wall. Through our process we came to discover how much data we could actually convey in a deceptively simple design language. “Time in Place” represents a snapshot of the activity at the intersection of Pike and Broadway on Capitol Hill. Every pedestrian walking, car driving and general activity around Pike and Broadway contributes to the overall design. This activity is displayed in a graphic design that is created from the data and ever changing to reflect the ebb and flow on the hill. On busy days you’ll notice the graph push out and away from the clock and during less busy times, the graph will sink into the core of the clock. Using the clock as the catalyst to the data, a user can spin the clock back in time to get a glimpse of activity on the hill days and months in the past.

Based on visual cues we are all accustomed to, red represents AM activity and blue represents PM activity. We have taken a 24 hour graph of this activity and wrapped it around a clock face giving a direct 1 to 1 comparison to the amount of activity and the time it occurred. We are constantly monitoring the intersection at Pike and Broadway and the clock’s design is constantly changing to reflect the unique movement on capitol hill each and every day. We’ve been recording this data since June of last year and will continue to do so to build on the historical data.

Our server is running a custom made program that grabs traffic camera data feeds and looks at these images for movement. We then tell the program how to interpret that movement and graph it around the clock based on the time that movement happened. So if you’re looking at the clock and see the red color spike way out and away form the clock at 8:00 am you’ll know there was a lot of activity there at that time. Also, if you see the graph dip into the clock and within the median, you’ll know that there was less activity at that hour than there was the day before. All of our data is compared to the previous day’s activity to give us what is in actuality, 48 hours worth of information displayed on a deceptively minimalist graphic design.

Our long-term goal is to open this up to multiple cities around the world and once we’ve acquired enough data, allow the user to expand and contract the time frame. We can get a daily snapshot like we have now and a snapshot of an entire year’s worth of activity. The possibilities with the program and design we’ve created allow for some very interesting and insightful data visualization. Imagine displaying this in a physical location. We are very interested in doing this and letting people watch their actions effect the overall design.

 

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