WebbyConnect: Elastic Minds of Designers

Wow.

This was the most amazing and entertaining session of the week, as a trio of designers shared a glimpse of what they're doing in the medium of bandwidth, data and a changing world.

Aaron Koblin of the Google Creative Lab, uses raw data in new ways. His visualizations of flight patterns over the U.S creates a flowing cascade that simplifies travel to a level of beauty. Watch the animations.

The physical representation of every text message sent in real time in Amsterdam on New Year's Eve shows data in a most unique fashion. The explosion of messaging that rises from the center of the metropolis at the stroke of midnight shows that people have replaced kissing their honeys with texting them instead.

Animated visualization of of the NYE SMS explosion:

SMS during New Years Eve from realtime city on Vimeo.

The Sheep Market is another experiment in humanity. Koblin used the Amazon Mechanical Turk tools to collect 10,000 drawings of sheep facing left. He paid 2-cents for each of the drawings, making his $200 investment a testimony to the flock. It, along with the other items featured here, were part of a recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Of the 7,599 unique IP addresses used to submit the drawings, only ONE person asked the obvious question; "Why Why are you doing this?"

Nicolas Roope of Poke, a London-based design company, showed the first-ever "endless" page on the Web. The client was Orange, a popular telco company in England. Through the use of some creative scripting, the Web page has the illusion of never being able to scroll to the bottom. Check it here.