“Sourcemap is a tool for producers, business owners and consumers to understand the impact of supply chains. The site is a social network where anyone can contribute to a shared understanding of the story behind products. You can simulate the impact of manufacturing, transporting, using and throwing away products using their Life-Cycle Assessment calculator. This web-based tool uses linked data from geological and geographic resources. Each ‘Sourcemap’ can be used to help market socially – and environmentally – conscious products and to buy carbon offsets. Supply chains published on the site can be embedded in external websites, printed onto product packaging or linked through QR codes readable by camera phones.” (Article source: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=708#)

The SourceMap website at http://www.sourcemap.org/beta/stage/ offers users the opportunity to make their own product, travel and/or food maps. Note that this open source site is optimised for the Firefox internet browser.

Food tracer uses d-touch visual markers which can be read at point of sale with a mobile phone. It is designed to address several “ethical issues” such as carbon cost,  packaging, local food, Fair Trade and organic. Many of Guiseppe’s ideas take the thinking behind the Fair Tracing project into exciting new directions. He says: “Fair Tracing has been an importnat source of inspiration for me”.

Have a look at Guiseppe’s project website: http://www.giuseppecostanza.it/foodtracer/index.htm    

Foodtracer is also on display at the Central Saint Martin’s 2009 Finalist Exhibition, June 22-25 between 10am -8pm at Candid Arts, 3 Torrens Street, London, EC1V 1NQ

Zappos Launches Realtime Ordering Map

“Want to know what shoes people are buying in Montpelier, Vermont? Then just watch the realtime map on the Zappos website long enough and you just might find out. With this new feature, the popular online retailer is giving consumers even more reason to keep up with the Joneses, as users are granted the ability to zero in on their home towns and wait to see what items pop up.”

The clothing company MADE-BY (based in Copenhagen) is “decicated to promoting sustainable clothing manufacture…You can recognise items produced…by the blue button…[Using its Track&Trace technology] you can even find out who made your T-shirt or skirt, and who picked, spun and wove the cotton”. (Source: “Track and Trace: Who made your skirt?”, Jackpot Magazine, Autumn 2008, p 77.)

“MADE-BY Track&Trace follows the trail of your clothes. With the MADE-BY code in your garment you can find out where your garment was made and by whom. In this way, MADE-BY brands open up the doors to the production process…MADE-BY Track&Trace is the very first system to trace the origin of clothes.” (Source: MADE-BY Track&Trace page at http://www.made-by.org/tracktrace.php?lg=en.)

Track & Trace is a database system…for manufacturers that was developed by MADE-BY in collaboration with Organic Exchange and the English IT company Historic Fu­tures. Every link in the production chain enters production information into the database and forwards it to the next link. This gives the brands as direct access as possible to production data from the other suppliers in the chain. Consumers can enter the code found on the clothing label into a simplified consumer page to see who was involved in the production of their clothing”. (Source: ”Track&Trace: what is it?” at http://www.made-by.org/downloads/TrackTrace_EN.pdf)

Or, visualising the US federal budget…

TimeTube, created by Dipity, the interactive timeline site, takes YouTube videos and arranges them by date, offering a useful (and often unexpected) perspective on search terms.

MotoGP statistics viewer

This is an interactive visualisation dashboard of recent statistics from MotoGP, the motorcycle road racing championship. The project explores different means of viewing to provide a novel way to understand the championship, individual races & the interrelationships between riders, manufacturers, tires & teams. Users can drill down into each race to explore different visualisations of lap graphs, gap differences by lap, lap times & average speeds. These details can then be cross-referenced by tire, manufacturer & lap time data.; see http://www.minglebee.com/gp/

Baby names

Dynamic graph that visualises baby name trends across time; see http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager

Barcode visualisation

An algorithmic visual representation of barcodes, of which the numerical codes determine the positions, curves & colors of Bezier curves in a tree structure. The number of curves varies in correspondence to the number of figures in the code. In addition, information details of the country of origin, manufacturer, product number & sum are displayed; see http://barcode-plantage.com/index.htm