Brian J Sherman and Clarity Information Design is now listed on Thumbtack.com

I just started using a new service called Thumbtack.com, after getting a personal email from Heather in there office here in San Francisco.

What is Thumbtack? Here’s what they say…

Why can you go online right now and buy any product you want but you can’t do the same for tutors, handymen, dog walkers, or other local services? Thumbtack is changing that.

Thumbtack isn’t like typical local search directories that simply return business listings with ratings and reviews, leaving you no better off than the paper Yellow Pages.

Instead, Thumbtack gives you the ability to vet, contact and book service professionals the moment you find them.

Data In Sight: Data Visualization Boot Camp

Last weekend I participated in Data In Sight, hosted at Adobe in San Francisco, where we had about 48 hours to assemble a team, devise a project to use Data Visualizations generated from sets of data, build it, and present it. What an incredible learning opportunity, and a chance to meet developers, designers, and a variety of other hackers interested in pushing the limits on Data Visualization! There were also workshops, like a UX Clinic, held by Hot Studio‘s Dani Malik, Executive Director of User Experience, and presentations by innovative designers like Joris Maltha of Catalogtree in The Netherlands.

My team started with four of us, generating a huge array of big ideas that would use a mash-up of public data sets to reveal useful tools to gain insights into current energy issues, or food issues. How can we use one of the data sets mandated for the competition, and mash it up with some other publicly available data source to reveal something interesting, and present it in a rich way that allows a user to interact with it to gain new insight into their world?

One of us fell ill, and “paralysis by analysis” gave way to a much simpler proposition: How can we use the data set of 60,000+ UFO sightings (one of the data sets featured for use in the competition) to reveal something interesting about this phenomenon?

Another member of our team hacked away furiously until late Saturday night before bowing out due to needing to move homes on Sunday, and by Sunday night two of us were humbly attempting to create a presentation with basic visualization functionality.

We didn’t win any of the categories of the competition, but along the way my eyes were opened much wider to the challenges we had all eagerly taken on, and how to work together to meet the judge’s deadline. More about my project team and what we created can be found here: http://datainsightresults.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/team-4 And I got a great T-shirt, one I will actually wear like a proud geek.

For a complete description of the event and a look at the winners of the competition, check out http://datainsightsf.com.

From Data Collection to Display: How Visualization Transforms Industries

(Held on May 26th, 2011)

The University of California, Berkeley’s CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) presented an excellent overview of how Data Visualization transforms industries. Sponsored with Detecon Consulting and the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (ever hear of MP3?), the event’s jam-packed agenda surveyed how Data Visualization is used in a wide range of industries, featuring speakers from across the spectrum. From high-investment medical technology to assist surgeons perform delicate procedures, to start-ups looking to capitalize on the new wealth–or is the proper word here “glut”?–of data available on the internet, information collection and display is changing our world.

Inspirational and brain-saturating technical, I plan to keep a tweet on the CITRIS center to see what the future holds. Check out the many videos and presentations here: http://citris-uc.org/news/2011/visualization_technologies

JavaScript Meetup and Night Owls at Citizen Space

Tonight I made it out of the woodshed for the first time as a newly independent designer, and spent the evening at Citizen Space (http://citizenspace.us). Two events! The first was the JavaScript meetup, which I attended to meet some developers and because I want to improve my mastery of JS. The second was the Night Owls meetup, where I continued to meet interesting developers and young entrepreneurs and work late into the night.

Lots of interesting ideas and start-ups happening right now, and it’s inspiring to be a part of it. Shook hands, traded cards, and traded thoughts about current projects with at least a dozen folks, all with free beer. Didn’t get much “work” done, but it felt great to experience so much going on and so many folks in need a good design perspective.

Looking forward to future meetups, and following up with my new “colleagues” on their projects.