This article was taken from the April issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Stamen is a San Francisco design and tech team that's reinventing how to display information.
Now it's coming to London to map the 2012 Olympics -- and demonstrate the new power of live data visualisation.
Journey Times Planning a trip? Stamen mapped how far public transport will take you -- in 15-minute increments -- from central London (pictured above). Democracy charity MySociety.org scraped Transport for London data; isolated bubbles represent Tube stops.
Stamen uses maps to explore data, not just to search for it; add, say, housing prices to the map, and you learn more about a neighbourhood you might want to live in. "We build objects to think with," says founder Eric Rodenbeck.
<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/674x281/k_n/kuler.jpg" alt="Kuler Colour"/>
Kuler Colour Adobe Kuler is an online app that lets you try out various colour schemes. Stamen wanted to see how people's choices varied across countries. On the left are the colours most used in the UK during the summer; above are those used in the US. These images show Stamen's nongeographic approach to mapping data across landscapes. "We look at what's in the data, and do our best to get out of the way," says Rodenbeck, "while making sure the work is beautiful enough to make you give a damn."
<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/674x281/s_v/stamen-oakland-heatmap-nokey_1.jpg" alt="Crimestopping"/>
Crimespotting The brazen 2007 murder of journalist Chauncey Bailey in Oakland, California, led Stamen partner Michal Migurski to make the city's crime data more accessible. This heat map of downtown uses data from CrimeWatch, a community website, to show the gaps between crimes at a given intersection: pale is high-crime; darker areas are safer.https://stamen.com/
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
