Visualization of the Week: The living city

Visualizing the urban flow of Geneva.

This week’s visualization comes from Interactive Things, a design and technology studio based in Zurich, Switzerland. The company has been working on a project called “Ville Vivante” — the living city.

Here’s how the coordinators describe the project:

“Based on the premise that the mobile phone has become the center of our everyday communication and main source of information, the City of Geneva, in cooperation with the Lift conference, decided to take the challenge to visualize the digital traces created by our mobile phones … the goal of the project was to visualize the urban flow of everyday life and make it visible to passersby at the local train station.”

geneva_atnight.jpg
Screenshot from the “Ville Vivante” visualization. See additional screens and learn more about the project.

In the Interactive Things’ blog post, the company talks about some of the design decisions that went into making visualizations that were aimed at the public and installed in public places.

The data comes from the Swiss telecommunications company Swisscom, and the dataset used for the visualization is based on one week’s worth of mobile data usage.

Found a great visualization? Tell us about it

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring visualizations. We’re always looking for leads, so please drop a line if there’s a visualization you think we should know about.

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