The New York Times Visualization and Interaction Projects
The New York Times interaction projects. Research and development: Michael Young, creative technologist; Alexis Lloyd, creative technologist; Nick Bilton, design integration editor; Ted Roden, creative technologist; Noriaki Okada, intern; Mark Hansen, resident. United States, 2010
The graphics department at The New York Times includes journalists with strong skills in visualization as well as experts in statistics, cartography, programming, and 3-D software. Graphics director Steve Duenes explains that the people on his staff generally don’t call themselves graphic designers. “We’re journalists,” he says. “We are drawing on the traditions of The Times and creating a direction on the Web that employs technology to surprise and engage readers while still clarifying and explaining the world around us.”
In the early years of the Web, The Times published print graphics online as static images, but now the medium permits complex interactions as well as video, animation, sound, and dynamic content. A 2009 map of U.S. immigration allows users to see patterns over time and place, tracking populations from twenty-three different regions of the world. An interactive 3-D travelogue from 2007 traced Tom Bissell’s harrowing climb to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, coordinating his path with photographs shot along the way and an ongoing account of his rising heart rate and plummeting oxygenation level.
On another floor of The New York Times headquarters, interaction designers are rethinking how news can be delivered and displayed in the future. The Times Reader changes the layout of the news in response to what device the user is employing. Customized news content can follow specific users from computer screen to phone to television to a print-on-demand kiosk, keeping track of where readers have left off or where they are geographically. Other experiments use proximity sensors to register the presence of users and to present news onscreen based on a person’s identity or their proximity to the device. Concepts like these are being tested and implemented now with live content from The Times.
Location: united states