flowerGarden

description

project site (data input disabled)

Inspired by Gustav Klimt's painting Flowergarden (1905), flowerGarden is an interactive visualization of social networking and concept sharing occurring within a group of 30 to 80 individuals.

FlowerGarden was deployed at the Bodies in Play Summit, a conference held at the Banff New Media Institute in May of 2005. Set up as a projected installation in the event space, participants entered information about the conversations and topics of discussion they had with others. Over the course of the event, flowerGarden grew from a few sparse flowers to a lush garden as the numbers of participants (flowers) and conversations (flower petals) increased.

The web application allows participants to input conversations information (grow mode), or navigate data (explore mode) visualized as an overlapping combination of a social network graph and a word cloud concept map. Each participant is represented as a flower with their initials in the centre and one petal for each conversation they have entered. A vine links participants who have had conversations. The frequency of concept entries is mapped to word size and position, showing commonly used terms in the centre of the circle and widely shared terms in bigger font. For the purposes of this exhibition, grow mode has been disabled but visitors can explore the garden grown by participants at the original conference in 2005.

The visualization is still online but the input functions have been disabled.  The work was exhibited at the National Academy of Science in 2007.  For that exhibit, a history slider was added to the interface to see a re-enactment of the growth of the garden.