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2015 Fellowship

In the summer of 2014 Stamen Design, Autodesk, SPUR, Harvard and Gray Area decided to create a fellowship program. The program offered a few talented students the opportunity to not only hone their visualization and mapping skills, but to get experience working in a design studio as well.

Fostering the growth of a budding colleague couldn't be more rewarding. Working with the fellows, we're able to be involved with design and research of art and urban design projects. As much as we teach, we also get to dive into areas we're curious about, like physical prototyping. We become both students and teachers in the process, and so do our fellows.

The task for the 2015 Fellowship was to make something visible about the city of San Francisco that was previously invisible. Take a look at what our fellows came up with!

2015 Fellowship Projects

Steve Pepple
Gray Area Creative Code Fellow

Steve found ways to collect and displays real-time data from and about the Mission District in San Francisco, including weather, social media words, emoji use, instagram colors, public transportation, and real estate stats. His experiments in visualization worked on temporal, social, and civic aspects of the neighborhood. Urban Heartbeat collected these experiments into a street installation that invites exploration of real-time, generative data visualizations. The visualizations were placed as live screens on Mission Street, engaging passers-by with data from the neighborhood.

Urban Heartbeat

Steve Pepple
Gray Area Creative Code Fellow

Steve found ways to collect and displays real-time data from and about the Mission District in San Francisco, including weather, social media words, emoji use, instagram colors, public transportation, and real estate stats. His experiments in visualization worked on temporal, social, and civic aspects of the neighborhood. Urban Heartbeat collected these experiments into a street installation that invites exploration of real-time, generative data visualizations. The visualizations were placed as live screens on Mission Street, engaging passers-by with data from the neighborhood.

Invasive Ricochet

Jill Hubley
Gray Area Creative Code Fellow

Following a series of personal projects about urban plantlife, Jill examined the invasive plant species in California, and the effects they had on local ecosystems (the impact to both native plants and other wildlife communities). She used species observation data gathered over the last 100 years to map the spread of invasives through time and space. Related historical moments and cultural anecdotes related to these plants were connected to the visualization to flesh out the story of their role and consequences to California.

Number Fog Designs

Andrew Kleindolph
Gray Area Creative Code Fellow

Coming out of trips to Senegal and Mali, Andrew became inspired by Dutch Wax Block Print Fabrics, which are ubiquitous to much of West Africa, and often incorporate everyday objects such as: computers, cell phones, binoculars, and USB cables. For the fellowship, Andrew created a series of San Francisco Block Print Fabrics, combining data and objects specific to this time and space in the Bay Area. Using Processing and csv data, the images and data can be swapped out, resized, recolored, combined, rotated, spaced, and more using parametric software sliders, toggle switches, knobs, and keyboard input. These patterns were then digitally printed to be turned into clothing and other textiles.

Oakland Atmospheres

Carlo Urmy
Gray Area Creative Code Fellow

Carlo set of in search of a way to visualize and understand vertical oriented weather data in the Bay Area. In search of data, he started working with the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive and weather balloons data from the Oakland Airport. Oakland Atmospheres works to reconcile this 70 years of data, and create a display that can access this data and engage users with vertical oriented weather data.

Shoreline Dimensions

Lindsay Irving
Gray Area Creative Code Fellow

Lindsay investigated the changing water’s edge in the Bay Area through geologic time. Mashing up past and future projections of where land and water converge, she created a timeline of the last 18,000 years of the Bay Area, and the projected next 100 years, showing the constantly changing condition between water and land in San Francisco.

Long Exposure

Joe Burg and Elaine Laguerta
Gray Area Creative Code Fellow

Joe and Elaine investigated ways of collecting and visualizing localized changes in air quality due to small proximity changes - highways, parking lots, parks. They set up a air sensor system that could test fluctuations and show levels with LED light displays. They then started photographing these LED levels with long exposure photography to see air quality at a particular time and space, and literally in the landscape it came from. This type of hyper-localized, physical data visualization in the end appear encapsulated in these images.

Partners

Obscura Digital

Obscura is an alliance of artists and technologists who are pioneering the future of multidimensional sensory experiences. From our beginning, we set convention aside to create entirely new encounters with light, image, sound, and motion. Our team shares a passion for inventing the uninvented, for exploring ways that technology can enable awe-inspiring moments. Our creativity is inseparable from our ingenuity. We were among the first to develop technologies that deliver unprecedented interactivity. Our exploration has led to multitouch screens, complex architectural mapping, 360-degree surround projections, and beyond.

Stamen Design

Since 2001, Stamen has developed a reputation for beautiful and technologically sophisticated projects in a diverse range of commercial and cultural settings. We work and play with a surprising and growing range of collaborators: news media, financial institutions, artists andarchitects, car manufacturers, design agencies, museums, technology firms, political action committees, and universities.

Presence PG

Presence provides digital product strategy and development for web and mobile products. We practice product management and product development, helping customers identify product market fit and create high quality products.