Visualizing Humanity

   
Aaron Koblin's many technological experiments and interfaces are put on show during his Ted Talk: 'Artfully visualizing our humanity'.  Each interface he showed had its own unique story, making his presentation both enjoyable and interesting.  His interfaces turned common everyday activities such as airplane flights and text messaging into data that not only gave us information about ourselves, but also painted a picture at the same time.  Koblin shows us that humanity's future is very bright in the digital age, as there are almost infinite possibilities in the boundless digital world.

In one of his first interfaces representing flight patterns, it showed air traffic calming down at night when most of us are asleep, then shows the east coast wake up, and finally shows the west coast wake up.  This interface also shows where the most busiest cities are, such as New York and Los Angeles.  Lastly, the air traffic interface used different colors to represent different types of flights such as shipping, commercial, etc. to paint a picture.  Overall, this was a creative and original idea to show us artistically about our lives in America.  Even in Amsterdam, technology shows us the tradition of New Years through SMS message data, by showing a huge spike in SMS messages sent at midnight.

One of his experiments consisted of him paying thousands of participants two cents each to draw a sheep facing to the left.  The time results ranged from 4 seconds to over 40 minutes to complete the drawing, with many sheep that could not be passed as sheep.  This seems like a simple task but the results from Koblin's experiment show that humanity as a whole view every little task differently than the next person.  Some of the participants took the drawing seriously while others did not, regardless, each person had a different interpretation of how to draw a simple sheep facing to the left.

 In this day and age we are surrounded by more and more different types of technology that is constantly getting upgraded, these experiments tell stories of humanity by using technology, which is much easier to access on the internet than going to a library and reading a book about different human cultures.  I think overall, the digital age makes humanity even more creative and artistic than ever before.