flowerGarden

social network and conversation visualization software

flowerGarden is an web-based software application, produced in Flash, for real-time social network and conversation visualization. It was used at the 3-day Bodies in Play summit in Banff, May 2005, at which the 50 participants were invited to input information about who they spoke to and what they discussed during the duration of the event. The visualization was projected on a large screen in the main summit venue to reflect the current state of the social network and discussion space of the summit.

 

Each participant, upon entering information into a form, is visually represented by a flower, with a petal growing on the flower in real-time as a new conversation is entered. The flowers of individuals who have conversed with one another are connected by green vines, and the closer two flowers are distanced from each other the more those people have spoken. The concepts discussed between all participants are laid out in the background according to their frequency of use. By rolling over flowers, petals, and words, different perspectives of the information can be seen.

 

online demo (click explore & wait for layout to load, may be slow on a Mac)

 

Designed and developed in collaboration with researcher Maria Lantin
Visualization Lab, Banff New Media Institute, 2005