Innovation Session

Innovation Session

Innovation Session: The Most Normal State – Part 2

In January I described a project idea for finding out which state is the most normal. Tonight I will pick up where I left off. Data Collection I am going to start by gathering data for each of the 50 states in a CSV – I also posted it as a google doc if you want to follow along. Eventually I suspect I will have to translate this into JSON before loading it into the visualization – but this is an easy way to get started. The first place I am going to try to get data is the US Census. Thankfully they have an API that I can use to get some population & demographic facts: http://www.census.gov/developers/ Unfortunately, the existance of an API is the only thing to get excited about. I got nowhere tonight. The US Census API is horrible to work with. I could be blind, but it took me an

Innovation Session

Innovation Session: Evaluating My System for Gathering Data on Myself

Last December I started measuring a few things about myself every day. Now, four months in, I’d like to take a look at how it has gone and what that data has shown me so I can improve upon the system. Success of the System Over 102 days I completed the survey 80 times. Based on that I would deem the method a success. Any system that is able to remind me to do something and succeed in getting me to do it ~80% of the time is doing pretty well in my book. Pivoting my completion percent by the day of week gave me the following.   The astute reader will notice that my completion rate was >1 on Wednesdays. I thought there might be a bug or double logging errors in my system. When I looked into it I realized that a few of those were actually my

Innovation Session

Innovation Session: Innovation Sessions

Last December – nearly five months ago – I posted my first innovation session. The idea was one that I had been floating just long enough to come up with a name (which I later found out is another name for a brainstorm). I was driving home after a surf session one Saturday, a time in which my head is usually very idea filled thanks to endorphins and adrenaline, and I realized that I could practice innovating. It dawned on me that innovation is a mental response and like other responses, it could be trained and strengthened. I am a strong believer in innovation. Not only do I enjoy it, but it is also the skill set that I will likely depend on to put food on my family’s table for the next 40 or so years. The magnitude of that realization led me to take action and create situations where I

Innovation Session

Innovation Session: Building A Better Surfing App With Data

Imagine this – its 6:00 AM on a Thrusday and you’re driving half an hour up the coast to surf a wave you never go to during the week. Why? Because your iPhone told you to. That killer session you had last summer, it looks like the swell is lining up to recreate it. So you grab your board and hit the road hoping to turn the stoke up to 11. The world of surf forecasting & reporting has evolved slowly over the last 50 years. While it has adapted to the world of websites and mobile apps – most are simply new skins on the broadcast weather radio reports surfers have relied on since 1967. They are channels for data. They tell you the swell height, period and direction and something about the wind. Even when they look amazing they are usually showing the same information. They are not simple and intuitive nor are

Innovation Session

Tony Gonzalez Infographic

Today is a great day for Atlanta Falcons fans. All-Pro tight end Tony Gonzalez announced he is coming back to play for one more year! To celebrate, lets take a look at some stats from Tony’s career and see why he is often praised as the greatest tight end of all time. Here is a preview image so you can look at something while the full thing loads… its kind of big. For the full infographic keep scrolling…   And here is the full infographic, which hopefully has loaded by now. To see it glorious full size, click the image below and then magnify it on the next screen. Enjoy!   I originally started this project as a way to dig into Tony’s stats to show that he should return for at least one more year. When I realized that his decision was largely based on personal matters – not

Innovation Session

Innovation Session: Tony Gonzalez Infographic Part 7

Tonight I finished the infographic I’ve been working on for the past seven weeks. Two versions of it actually, one for if Tony G. retires and one for if he comes back to play another year. They are fairly similar, but with subtle differences in the presentation in order to change the emphasis of the message. I suppose at some point I can put them up side by side to see if those subtleties are achieved. I’m actually a bit torn right now because I like the version for the retirement scenario better, but I’d rather get to see Tony play for another year. Like any project, once I finished the first 90%, I could start on the second 90%. There was a good bit of polishing to do but I’ve actually tried to do some of it as I went, mainly when I was stumped on something else. The

Innovation Session

Innovation Session: Tony Gonzalez Infographic Part 6

Done! Pretty much anyways. All of the major data for the infographic is now in place – I’m sure I’ll make a few final tweaks, but for the most part I’m pretty happy with it. Tonight I spent most of my time wrestling with a few ideas of how to present comparisons between Tony G. and the current crop of Tight Ends in the league. I started with the idea of normalizing per season, but realized that most athletes, Tony included, experience their top performance in the early half of their career.Also, many athletes, Tony excludes, get injured as they get older and start missing games or have to stop playing all together. I had a thought that I would project out the averages of each player into the future to predict when would be the soonest they could catch any of Tony’s current records. As I started working on

Innovation Session

Innovation Session: Tony Gonzalez Infographic Part 5

Night 5 of the Tony Gonzalez infographic. Tonight I mainly spent time making  tweaks to sections of the image I had already worked on. Some of it was nitpicking pixels, but a good bit was adding new information to charts that I already thought were packed. I’m really happy with the additional information I was able to get into a few of them tonight. I’d like to take a moment to talk about my thoughts on design iteration. As I design a data visualization I constantly ask myself five questions: What story am I trying to tell right here? Can I add any additional insight? What can I remove without sacrificing the story? Is the image easy to understand on its own? How can I make this awesome? Repeating this process tends to refine the image with each iteration. As elements are added the visualization becomes easier to understand but

Innovation Session

Innovation Session: Tony Gonzalez Infographic Part 4

19 hours down – the infographic now measures 16″ wide by 85″ tall – meaning it is officially taller than Tony Gonzalez. I wrapped the section comparing Tony’s career to 9 other of the greatest tight ends ever to play in the NFL. Here is a sneak preview, see if you can guess who each of them is just from the caricature. At this point I feel there are two things left to do: Compare Tony’s early years to the best tight ends of 2012 – to show how long the likes of Gronkowski and Graham have to go before catching the records of #88. Dig through the rest of the stats I have on Tony’s career looking for random trivia. We could be looking at a completed project in 2-3 more weeks which puts us right around the Free Agency start date. I’m not sure anything significant will happen

Innovation Session

Innovation Session: Tony Gonzalez Infographic Part 3

Tonight I spent 4 hours trying to represent some of football’s famous tight ends as vector images. How did I do? Random Trvia: I went to High School with Kellen Winslow Jr. and had a chance to meet his dad one day while I was setting up hurdles for a track workout. They were on the field doing a photo shoot for Sports Illustrated and the photographer needed an extra hand with something. I got to hang out for a bit and they took a few photos of me with the HOFer. I’m now 15 hours into this project and experiencing a bit of scope creep – the project keeps getting bigger as I get more done. I have however decided that I’m going to wait to release the final project until Tony either a) has an official retirement ceremony b) announces he will play for one more year. The marketer