{"id":8119,"date":"2012-06-28T13:01:48","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T20:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nearfuturelaboratory.com\/seventh-and-half\/?p=1623"},"modified":"2017-08-18T17:57:56","modified_gmt":"2017-08-18T17:57:56","slug":"unveiling-quadrigram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com\/2012\/06\/28\/unveiling-quadrigram\/","title":{"rendered":"Unveiling Quadrigram"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"www.quadrigram.com\"
\nwww.quadrigram.com<\/a><\/p>\n

So for the last 8 months I have been working almost exclusively with my friends at the information visualization consulting company Bestiario<\/a> on new tools to visualize information. Last year, based on our joint experience, we detected two increasing demands within innovative institutions. First the wish to think with liberty with data, outside of coding, scripting, wizard-based or blackbox solutions. Then, we perceived the necessity to diffuse the power of information visualization within organizations to reach the hands of people with knowledge and ideas of what data mean. <\/p>\n

Our efforts have now culminated into Quadrigram<\/a>, a Visual Programming Environment to gather, shape and share living data. By living data we mean data that are constantly changing and accumulating. They can come from social network, sensor feeds, human activity, surveys, or any kind of operation that produce digital information. <\/p>\n

For Bestiario and its long track record in ‘haute couture’ interactive visualizations, Quadrigram offers ‘pr\u00eat-\u00e0-porter’ solutions for organizations, consultants, analysts, designers and programmers working routinely with these types of data. As with other services, data visualization plays a central role in the making sense and sharing of complex data.<\/p>\n

I got the chance to work on multiple conceptual, engineering and strategic aspects of Quadrigram. In this post I summarize four most main areas I had the pleasure to shape in collaboration with Bestiario:<\/p>\n

1) Redefining work with data<\/strong><\/p>\n

For us at Near Future Laboratory it made sense in helping Bestiario with our experience in prototyping solutions that become feedback loops where our clients can actually figure something out. Indeed, more and more results of our investigations became interfaces or objects with a means of input and control rather than only static reports. The design of Quadrigram lays on this very idea of ‘feedback loop’ and provides a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) interface. It is designed for iterative exploration and explanation. Each iterations or \u201csketches\u201d is an opportunity to find new questions and provide answers with data. Data mutate, take different structure in order to unveil their multiple perspectives. We like to think that Quadrigram offers this unique ability to manipulate data as a living material that can be shaped in real time or as Mike Kuniavsky<\/a> nicely describes in Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design<\/a>: “Information is an agile material that needs a medium”. And this not only concerns ‘data scientists’ but rather everybody with knowledge and ideas in a work that involves data.<\/p>\n

With the diffusion of access to data (e.g. the open data movement), our investigation with data has become utterly multi-disciplinary. Nowadays, our projects embark different stakeholders with fast prototyped tools that promote the processing, recompilation, interpretation, and reinterpretation of insights. For instance, our experience shows that the multiple perspectives extracted from the use of exploratory data visualizations is crucial to quickly answer some basic questions and provoke many better ones. Moreover, the ability to quickly sketch an interactive system or dashboard is a way to develop a common language amongst varied and different stakeholders. It allows them to focus on tangible opportunities of product or service that are hidden within their data. I like to call this practice ‘Sketching with Data<\/a>‘, others such as Matt Biddulph<\/a> talks about “Prototyping with data<\/a>” (see also Prototyping location apps with real data<\/a>). Regardless of the verb used, we suggest a novel approach to work data in which analysis and visualizations are not the unique results, but rather the supporting elements of a co-creation process to extract value from data. In Quadrigram, the tools to sketch and prototype took the form of a Visual Programming Environment.<\/p>\n