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The world is awash in data — environmental sensors, cell phone data, consumer purchasing habits, social media participation, traffic flows, medical histories. And like many designers, ESI has been excited about the opportunities coming out of the emerging field of data visualization, which can help the world make sense of Big Data flowing around us and inspire large-scale change.

Over the last few years, ESI’s visionary founder, Ed Schlossberg, has been in conversation with his alma mater, Columbia University, to enhance its design leadership by advancing the field of data visualization through interdisciplinary collaboration. 

On July 2, at the prestigious Aspen Ideas Festival, Ed was on deck to help announce the launch of the Advanced Data Visualization Project (ADVP) at Columbia University. The initiative, which is sponsored by Thomson Reuters and will be based out of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), will facilitate research into data visualization and its implications for academia and industry.

Ed, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, and Mark Wigley, Dean of GSAPP, presented the vision of ADVP within a panel discussion titled ‘Information’s Beautiful Future’, moderated by James Powell, Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Reuters.

In 2010 we're seeing more instruments and applications that encourage experimentalism through touch-sensitive controls, wearable performance interfaces, and laser beams. Today, a novice keyboard player can sound like a virtuoso within a matter of minutes using highly responsive touch screens/pads to manipulate sounds.  As innovations in music technology transfer from complex systems to more user-friendly interactive platforms, music can become easier to play for those who never thought they could.

Ocarina ($1) is a perfect example of a highly innovative and social iPhone music app that works for both trained musicians and ordinary people as an instrument. Through movement, touch, and breath, Ocarina’s “tap and play” interface allows users to create music on the go so that they can share with other users around the globe. Ocarina users are instructed to blow into their iPhone microphone port while tapping the four holes on the screen to manipulate the instrument’s pitch, add vibrato by tilting the iPhone down, and change the volume by blowing harder or softer into the port. Ge Wang, a founder at Smule which created Ocarina explains, “The iPhone will never replace a physical instrument like a violin, but these new instruments are only possible on the phone, and it’s something people always have with them.”  

At the recent Digital University Conference at CUNY's Graduate Center in Manhattan, a diverse cast of media practitioners, digital content developers, academics, and academic publishers got together to "assess the impact of digital media on academic work and academic policy and authority."

During a panel called A Digital Future?, Josh Greenberg – the New York Public Library’s Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship – spoke about an escalating phenomenon: the number of people who use the NYPL’s research libraries has gone into steep decline.

A major reason: an ever-increasing number of us are doing much (if not most) of our daily research online. The drawback? It's a quest that, for many, typically goes no deeper than three or four Google search result screens. And only a tiny fraction of the material held by the NYPL (let alone thousands of other public archives) is available online.

The result, Greenberg suggested, is that heavy reliance on the web is watering down the scope and depth of the research even advanced students do during their school years. If true, what will be the impact when millions of graduates carry their 'if Google can't find it, the information doesn’t exist' habits into their adult careers?