Q&A With Shawn Allen of Stamen Design

Shawn Allen is a partner at Stamen Design, a small San Francisco-based firm with big ideas. Stamen does lots of work with maps, data visualization, information trends, and collective think-tankery. Indirect Collaboration's Tim Lillis interviewed Shawn about Stamen's process and philosophy in February 2010.

Lillis: Stamen Design seems to occupy a space somewhere between a design firm and a think tank. Are your research projects driven by your commercial work, vice-versa, or other?

Allen: Probably more vice-versa. I think of most of our work as "research" in the sense that we often don't really know what we're building when we start. Through the process of investigating the data and visualizing it for ourselves, we come up with something that our clients can either (in the case of more commercial projects) provide to their users or (in the case of our more think-tanky work) use to learn something interesting about their own information. The really good projects provide us with an opportunity to play with some new technology or investigate an idea that's been rattling around in our heads for a while. If we don't find that opportunity in our commercial work, though, we usually end up just building it for ourselves—this is how Crimespotting came to be.


Lillis: Crimespotting was a big hit for you guys. Can you tell me more about its inception?

Allen: Oakland Crimespotting was originally a research project of Mike Migurski's. He was laid up in bed with a bad back and wanted to figure out a way that he could get useful information out of his city's official crime map. This thing is awful. You have to click through at least five forms until it even shows you a map, and when it does the data is often filtered down to too small of a subset to be useful. So he set about building an application that would basically submit every permutation of the application's forms, grab the images generated by each submission, find crime icons on them then put the locations and other metadata into his own database. In the process of creating interactive maps to look at the data he was collecting, he also built the first version of Modest Maps, a open source map interaction library which we now use for pretty much every single one of our map-related commercial projects.

Lillis: What are some of the public conversations that have opened up as a result of Crimespotting?

Allen: A lot of people see Crimespotting as a shining example of open data, and a way for citizens to inform themselves about their community. During the site's first year we got some great feedback from Oakland residents who were bringing spreadsheets generated by Crimespotting to their regular meetings with local police officers and asking them what they were doing about, for instance, the recent rash of auto thefts in their neighborhood. Crimespotting armed these citizens with information that they used to have to rely on the police to get.

It's been a while since we've heard any more of those stories, though. Most mentions of Crimespotting that we read on the internet these days simply marvel at the number of dots on the map. Crimespotting does much more than just show you points on a map, though. You can get RSS feeds for crimes in your beat. We've applied for a grant to invest some serious time in Crimespotting and turn it into a site that engages journalists and (hopefully) fosters more direct civic engagement.

Lillis: Many of your projects depend on information coming from somewhere else. What has your experience been with government sources vs. citizen, or crowdsourced data?

Allen: My experience has been that just getting the data in the first place is the most difficult part of the process, regardless of the source. Crimespotting's original Oakland manifestation was an exercise in freeing a source of data that had never before been made publicly available, whereas the San Francisco version was built in less than a week after some very nice municipal employees who'd been tasked with opening the city's data provided us with a KML feed. The devil is in the details, though, and we often spend the entire duration of a project working out the specifics of data formats, timeliness, and completeness with our clients. We still don't have homicides in our San Francisco crime feed, for instance.


Lillis: In your In The News project, it seems that at some point you had to shut it down because you had too much information. Did you think about adding filters to create a unique experience for each user? Are there other ways you considered dealing with this surplus?

Allen: I actually just started working with Mike and Eric after they'd finished In the News, so I'm not qualified to answer that first question. But generally speaking, yes: while our first inclination—and our preference, I think—is to show everything, there are indeed data sets simply too large or complex to be visualized usefully in their entirety. One of the things that I think we do best is create interfaces that allow the user to filter data down into subsets that are manageable. It's important to build tools that can be played with and manipulated easily and in realtime. Those interactions are what help people discover new and exciting things at their own pace.


Lillis: I think we all have assumptions that we make about what "the crowd" is doing or thinking. Were you surprised by some of the patterns you saw emerging through your projects?

Allen: Absolutely. When I was working on the Digg Labs pieces I was constantly surprised at all of the weird stuff that people were submitting and digging. The dog pile effect of particularly big stories—which, in the world of tech, means events like the iPhone announcement and the AACS encryption key controversy—was pretty shocking, and a lot of fun to watch. Some stories broke on Digg before they broke on major news outlets, and it was fascinating to watch the conversation around them develop in this totally organic environment. It felt especially voyeuristic before the tools launched, too, because nobody knew that they were being watched like that. For a brief period we toyed with the idea of building versions of the visualizations that would help Digg find bots and track other abuses. But the public visualizations ended up being much more interesting and buzz-worthy.

Lillis: In the projects where you're collecting live data, have you witnessed people "playing to the room," where they seem to have changed their behavior because they know they're being monitored?

Allen: No doubt. Some Digg users dugg so many stories that their dots on Swarm turned into giant yellow orbs bigger than the stories themselves. A couple of people even posted videos on YouTube of their activity making the visualizations do weird stuff. Some stories blew up so quickly that they took over the screen, as was also the case during the MTV VMAs last September, when Kanye  West stormed the stage and interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech. At the height of that controversy there were thousands of mentions of Kanye on Twitter every minute, and a significant portion of them also happened to use the word "asshole": http://stamen.com/clients/mtv


Lillis: In some instances you're pulling in multiple data sets, have you had occasion to combine these to create or offer something you weren't expecting?

Allen: We've done some pretty cool stuff with a group called MySociety in the UK that cross references multiple data sets. Tom Carden created the first of our interactive travel time maps, which overlaid the shape representing how far you can get via public transit within a given time period with the cost of homes in the same area. The thresholds for each variable were adjustable individually and in realtime, and the map showed you areas where the data overlapped—that is, where you could buy a house for less than £500k *and* get to work from in less than an hour. We later developed this into a slippy map which you could pan and zoom, and introduced a third variable: "scenicness" scores culled from a site that MySociety set up to crowdsource Flickr photo ratings that could help you filter out less visually appealing regions.

Lillis: On your site, you refer to your clients as collaborators, how important is this distinction in your work?

Allen: I would say that it's paramount. The tighter our connection with the client, the faster things happen. We appreciate that some clients are going to defer to us on every design-related decision, but the smart ones who can call us out and involve themselves in the process are typically more fun to work with. We thrive on fast-paced projects, rapid iteration, and constructive feedback. If we haven't spoken to our client in a week something's broken.

Q & A: Charles Burns and Gary Panter

Breton's cadavre exquis could be argued as the first strict experimental art that began to play with the ideas behind collectivist artistic enterprise. Arising out of the surrealist movement, Breton, Duchamp, Tanguy and others completed each others drawings in an attempt to capture the ephemeral expressionist impulse that is born of multiple minds sharing a creative direction.

In our continuing series of interviews about Indirect Collaboration, we interviewed legendary underground comic artists Gary Panter and Charles Burns, on their continuing exquisite corpse game by mail.

How did the game start, and why?

Gary Panter: Charles and I have done a lot of collaborative projects--exquisite corpse variations maybe, but not strictly the folded paper game of the Surrealists. We both participated in an exquisite corpse comic strip book initiated by Art Spiegelman where artists continued the comic strip begun by someone else with the rule that the through-character remained identifiable; Charles and I did a book which Charles initiated where we each drew grotesque faces to a template Charles made. In the book the faces were die-cut horizontally and bound so that you could scramble the faces; and even more fun, Charles and I have done fully collaborative comic stories that are elaborate jams that begin in person and continue through the mail.

Charles Burns: I think there's a little confusion because Gary and I never really worked on an exquisite corpse together.

The first project we worked on together was a book called Facetasm where we created drawings of different heads that roughly fit a generic template and then the pages were cut into three parts (eyes, nose, mouth) and bound into a spiral bound book so all of the sections could be flipped back and forth creating multiple permutations. This came about because Gary and I were invited to be in a two-person exhibit together and I suggested making an announcement based on the "Facetasm" idea I just described and it grew from there.

The second collaboration resulted in a piece called "Pixie Meat" (above). This was a number of comic pages we worked on together, first in pencil and then in ink. Gary was visiting me in Philadelphia and I pulled out a stack of old comics and magazines for "inspiration" and we just sat and drew with no real intention in mind other than enjoying an afternoon sitting at big kitchen table drawing. We continued passing the pages back and forth for a few months and eventually had enough pages to publish a short piece. We asked our friend, novelist Tom DeHaven to write text for our artwork and then had it published.

Our collaborations came about simply because I love Gary's work and thought it would be fun to mix our different styles together. It's rare for me to work in any collaborative manner and this was an excuse to sit and come up with some absurd-looking drawings. When I was growing up, I forced my friends to sit and draw with me and in some way this had a similar feel too it... Looking over and seeing that your friend had come up with something amazing.

Had either of you ever done an exquisite corpse game before? If so, with who? How was that game different from this one?

GP: I have done exquisite corpse at parties and there was a book published by the Drawing Center , years ago that Charles and I were probably both in. To me it is a light-weight party game and not the best way to make a piece of art together. Not my favorite art game.

CB: I've done exquisite corpse drawings with my friends before and they're fun but never seem to amount to much other than a diversion... a drawing on a cocktail napkin. I was invited to participate in an exquisite corpse exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York and I managed to find a way to do a collaboration with Mark Beyer and Peter Saul -- it sounded like a great match, but to be honest, the end result wasn't all that interesting.

Was there something in particular about each other that made the game make more sense, than with other artists?

CB: I enjoyed working together with Gary because we share similar interests (comic books, monster magazines, Japanese toys) but our drawing styles are different enough to make end result unpredictable. I also really enjoyed taking his pencil drawings and rendering them in ink -- it's a way of really examining how another artist constructs a drawing.

GP: I've collaborated with a lot of friends on drawings. Most collaborations don't work and need to be terminated in the bud. With Charles there is a deep respect and trust and love of play.

What's the pushme-pullyou aspect of your particular collaborative relationship? Is one person more likely to make the first line, or push it in a different direction?

GP: In most collaborations, I have been involved there is a leader and a willing accomplice. But mainly laughter is the organizing principle in the collaboration. Charles and I both feel free to erase or alter the game. Charles is one of the best inkers in the world and I am shaky, so I have to get a good brush and do the tighten up to play, but that is fun. We learn from each other.

Is there an element of competition?

GP: No, I don't think so. We are trying to make each other laugh and make something that fuses together.

CB: There was no competition. There was really only the hope that we'd come up with something fun to look at - a weird hybrid of our styles and imagery.

Do you find yourself being more of less free, creatively, when you know someone else will also have input? Do you rein yourself in, in the expectations of the other, or do you let yourself go more, challenging the other person to make something of it?

CB: For me doing a collaboration is taking "time out" from my usual work. It's actually fun to do and I think part of the reason is there are different expectations and less control. It's like letting go of the tight control I always maintain on my writing and drawing and allowing myself to work on something with no "rules". For it to work there has to be a mutual respect, but you also need to be aggressive enough to alter (fuck-up?) the other persons drawing.

GP: In order to draw with someone or make music together there has to be close listening and watching and an intent to make a collective vision rather than a singular vision.

Is there something about collaborative art that isn't there with solo art? Is it useful, or just a parlor game?

GP: The Jack Kirby unimind.

CB: Collaboration for me is about letting go of all my control and forcing myself to explore a different perspective. Although we share similar interests, Gary constantly comes up with ideas and images I could never possibly imagine -- that's when it gets good.

GP: Charles and I have made drawing that i think are very important to us. That goes for the other collaborations we have done with friends, like Art Spiegelman, Edwin Pouncey, Jay Cotton and Ric Heirtzman and more.

I like that the notion that "being allowed to fuck up": in all the collaborative art projects I've done, it's also been a just-for-fun game, as well, which to me speaks to rigorous idealism behind singular artistic vision. In popular culture, artists are always portrayed as 'free spirits', but the artists I know are some of the most tightly dedicated people to their very particular way of doing something. Additionally, the ideal of the artist is that of auteur genius. Collaboration can fracture of the benevolent dictatorship of artistic vision, which we've already revealed can occasionally be a good thing; you're obviously just two people playing; would it work better or worse with four people? How about 10 or 20?

CB: I've done several collaborations and they usually work best with just one other person. With two minds, the focus is tighter and the end results are usually more interesting.

GP: A one to one collaboration is better for me. There is a better chance to find the middle ground. More people more chaos. The Zap artists were really good at jamming. Most jams look like shit.

Our panel in March is obviously focusing of collective creativity, and in particular how it manifests itself on the web. We in our culture, and especially on the internet, tend to value egalitarianism, at least in theory; but in the art world, the tight focus is on the dominant individual. Are internet culture and art culture wildly divergent for that reason? And if they are different, what does that mean for both? What if Vermeer had to fret obsessively as to whether his teeshirt design would get voted for on Threadless?

GP: Projects do need leaders or cheerleaders. Often one person will push the project harder. There is the danger of people getting too knitted together. We have to learn to easily move from isolated creative vision and consensual ideation and work. I am interested in the strength of little things and little things as prototypes for bigger things, so a team of one or two or three appeals to me. Vermeer would've done one t-shirt in his whole career and he would've known it was the best t-shirt Threadless ever had.

Ten Thousand Cents

San Francisco media artist Takashi Kawashima has been exploring crowdsourced art for a few years, now.

For example, Takashi's 2005 project "The King Has...", a collaboration with Krister Olsson, invited people to text the artist(s) their most burdensome secrets; these secrets were then posted (anonymously) in a public place. Video below:

The King Has... from Takashi Kawashima on Vimeo.

Between November 2007 and March 2008, Takashi collaborated with Aaron Koblin on "Ten Thousand Cents," a "coordinated, crowdsourced [digital] art project" created by several thousand individuals using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service — a crowdsourcing marketplace, publicly launched in 2005, that enables computer programs to coordinate the use of human intelligence — and a customized Flash-based drawing software.

Koblin and Takashi divided a high-res scan of the $100 bill into 10,000 equal parts, each of which was delivered to a "turker" who was paid a penny to duplicate it using the drawing tool. Contributors (who hailed from 51 different countries) didn't have any idea of the whole picture. The project took 5 months to complete; the idea was to use 10,000 turkers, but some turkers participated more than once. The end result was a reproduction of a $100 bill that cost $100 to create. Video:

Ten Thousand Cents from Ten Thousand Cents on Vimeo.

There's a neat interface here that lets you watch any one of the 10,000 Flash paintings being created. "Ten Thousand Cents" was a finalist (Experimental category) for a SXSW Web Award in 2009.

More recently, Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey collaborated on "Bicycle Built for Two Thousand" (great title), which used Amazon Mechanical Turk to record 2,088 sound clips. Turkers were sent a short-short sound clip — snipped from a mechanical-speech version of the 1892 song "Daisy Bell" — and asked to imitate what they heard, using a custom audio recording tool in a web browser. They were not given additional information. People from 71 countries participated; they were paid six cents apiece. Stitched back together, the clips sound like this:

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

Why a mechanical-speech version of "Daisy Bell"? Because the song was used, in 1962, as the first example of musical speech synthesis. (That's also why HAL sings it, in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Q&A: Margaret Wertheim

Margaret Wertheim is an Australian-born science writer who — along with her sister, the poet and critic Christine Wertheim — cofounded the Institute for Figuring, a Los Angeles-based organization "dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts." In 2005, the Wertheims launched the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project in their Highland Park living room; in 2010, the now-massive sculpture will be exhibited at the Smithsonian. From the beginning, the Wertheims imagined the project as a collective enterprise — but they had no idea how far it would spread. Joshua Glenn interviewed Margaret Wertheim in January 2010.

GLENN: What is the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project?
WERTHEIM: We produce sculptures that are a crocheted version of the Great Barrier Reef. Coral reefs have this very distinctive look about them — these crenellated, frilly forms, which are basically versions of hyperbolic geometry. And it turns out that the only way we know how to make models of hyperbolic geometry is with crochet. [From the IFF website: "The basic insight is to understand that these forms result from the simple process of increasing the number of stitches in every row. The more often you increase stitches the faster the model will grow and the more crenellated the finished form will become."] The Project was conceived because coral reefs all over the world are dying out. The evidence is that by 2030, corals might not grow any more due to the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere going into the seas. So the Project resides at the intersection of mathematics, marine biology, feminine handicraft, and collective art practice. It is also a political project, because it is raising consciousness of global warming.



GLENN: The code that allows you to model hyperbolic geometry with crochet was discovered by Daina Taimina, a Latvian mathematician at Cornell. Was it she who figured out that these crochet models look like bits of coral reef?
WERTHEIM: Dr. Taimina was interested in just doing them as pure mathematical models. Christine and I realized, after we'd crocheted a few [hyperbolic models], that if you started deviating from the mathematical perfection of Taimina's models, the [resulting creations] actually looked like a coral reef. As soon as we started varying the formulae a little, you get things that are not mathematically perfect — so, not good for teaching a course on hyperbolic geometry at Cornell, but they look a lot more organic. We realized, this is what nature is doing. Nature is not being strictly geometrically perfect because nature doesn’t have to adhere to the rules of mathematics. Instead, it is doing variations, and that is why you get the diversity of forms in nature — because life starts from a simple code and then diversifies and complexifies. We started saying, "OK, how can we replicate things that look like natural forms rather than pure mathematical ones?"

GLENN: How has the Crochet Reef developed differently, thanks to "indirect collaboration," to use Joe Alterio and Tim Lillis's phrase, than it otherwise might have?
WERTHEIM: Everybody who takes up these [crochet] techniques starts to vary it in different ways — in ways that that we would never have thought of, necessarily, ourselves. So you get this endless variation that comes from people just trying things that are, as it were, inherent in the whole system. [From the IFF site: "Loopy 'kelps,' fringed 'anemones,' and curlicued 'corals' have all been modeled. While the process that brings these models into being is algorithmic, endless permutations of the underlying formulae result in a constantly surprising panoply of shapes. The quality of yarn, style of stitch, and tightness of the crochet all affect the finished forms so that each is as individual as a living organism.] Which raises very beautiful questions about the relationship between pure mathematics and the physically manifest material structure of the world that we actually live in.



GLENN: You and your sister started to make the Crochet Reef in Christmas 2005. Did you imagine it as an open-source collaborative project from the beginning?
WERTHEIM: Yes, I put up an announcement on the Institute for Figuring website asking for people to join us. We thought maybe ten, twenty people around the world would join us — and that the final project would occupy a few coffee tables' worth of space. Nearly five years later, there have been thousands of people who have contributed models to our exhibitions and hundreds of thousands of people have come to the exhibitions, and who knows how many have attended workshops and learned to do it. It has become this unintended worldwide movement, and it has just blown our minds.

GLENN: Why has the Crochet Reef, which has no major institutional support of any kind and very little funding, taken off like this?
WERTHEIM: What people are really doing when they participate in the Project is a form of experimental mathematics. And I think it is not insignificant that that is happening among women, not men. We have had a few men, and we welcome them, but 99.99% of people who do this are women — who tell us, again and again, that they love the idea of being taken seriously as people who engage with math and science. Here is a project in the context of a handicraft that women feel comfortable with and enjoy, and they are being told, "You too, can understand the mathematics that underlies general relativity." The Project has tapped into a hunger of women, everywhere, to be taken seriously as intellectual forces. Which is a reason that I've made it my full-time job, though there is no full-time salary.

GLENN: Might the Crochet Reef one day receive funding from the kinds of institutions that try to engage folks with scientific and mathematical ideas — through things like Lego Mindstorms and the X Prize?
WERTHEIM: I guarantee, from my work as a science communicator, that 99% of people who engage in Lego Mindstorms will be boys. Millions of dollars are being pumped into such projects, and there is no money being pumped into the Crochet Coral Reef Project, which is engaging thousands and thousands of women and girls all over the world. I think community projects and community creativity, it is one of the important trends of our time. But the resources available to encourage such projects are overwhelmingly in computers, say, or robotics. I am all for those things, but most of people involved in those things are boys. Engaging people in math and science can also take place in things like paper and scissors, it can take place in crochet. There are lots of handicrafts that have math and science involved — in fact, weaving led to the invention of the loom, and punch-cards come from the loom, and punch-cards helped lead to the computer. So it can be argued that weaving was the first digital technology. When any collective project happens, it's worth asking a political question: "Where is the support, and which projects get supported?"



GLENN: Is the opportunity to collaborate in a collective artwork — as opposed to being a solo artist — another important part of the appeal of the Crochet Reef?
WERTHEIM: One thing that we get told, again and again, is how much engagement with the math and science is meaningful. And the other thing that the participants tell us that is immensely powerful to them is the opportunity to participate in a total work that is more than just themselves. In the upper echelons of the art world, what is valorized is the individual genius of the artist. But what this project taps into is the opposite of that. There are many tens of thousands of hours of work in this totality. When you walk into an art exhibition where there is more than five hundred people’s work on display, the sheer congealed hours of human labor helps you see that it is just simply is physically impossible for one person to do this much work. The totality of what thousands of people produced is much more — both greater and more beautiful — than what any individual genius, one individual person, could produce.

GLENN: So it's not merely the Crochet Reef's sheer size that's so impressive, but its variation?
WERTHEIM: When you walk into a room with five hundred people’s work and each person has been free to express themselves differently — obviously many of them just do the "canonical" reef patterns, but lots of them will also take up and go in special directions — you get such a feeling of commitment and intensity, of handmade labor. There are knitting machines, but there is no such thing as a crochet machine, so the Project is true commitment.

GLENN: Do you think women are more attracted to collaborative projects than men are?
WERTHEIM: In terms of the collective group enterprise, women have been having sewing circles and quilting bees since the dawn of time. Some critics have argued, with good cause, that the collective feminist art projects of the early 1970s — like the 1972 installation "Womanhouse" — were the start of this whole trend that is now called Relational Aesthetics, which is to say artistic practices that take as their point of departure human relations as opposed to a solo genius, and which has been taken up by many men.



GLENN: What is your end goal for the Crochet Reef?
WERTHEIM: What we would love is if some museum somewhere would give it a permanent home so we could set it up once and for all beautifully. It is too big to store in our house. At the moment it is all in storage in Arizona, and then it will go to Ireland, and then to Smithsonian Museum of Natural History later this year.

GLENN: If a museum does take the Crochet Reef, will people stop contributing to it?
WERTHEIM: I doubt it. Every week, I get emails from communities all over the world saying, "We want to do this." It has truly gone viral. People say, "How long do you intend to keep doing this?" I don’t know. I used to have a serious career as a science journalist. I write books about the cultural history of physics, and I have been struggling to get my most recent book finished because the reef literally took over my life.

Street Sounds

Sponorship as a force of good: Streets Sounds is an interactive way for users to upload various found environmental sounds to a rich media database of the US. Though it might not be useful in a professional capacity – seems like most sounds are recorded in a low enough quality for upload's sake that they're probably best used as tidbits – it advances the idea of a collective database of not just information, but experience. Taken together, it's a useful collage of what our country sounds like, especially if it gets popular. Up next: the Library of Congress' Archive of Smells!

Artist Harrell Fletcher sent me this call for proposals for Open Engagement, a three-day conference at Portland State University (May 14-17, 2010), exploring the role of the artist in socially-engaged art.

Open Engagement is a three-day conference that is an initiative of the Portland State University Art and Social Practice concentration and co-sponsored by Pacific Northwest College of Art and Portland Community College. Directed by Jen Delos Reyes and Harrell Fletcher and planned in conjunction with the Portland State University MFA Monday Night Lecture Series, this conference features three nationally and internationally renowned artists: Mark Dion, Amy Franceschini (Futurefarmers) and Nils Norman. The conference will showcase work by Temporary Services, InCUBATE, and a new project by Mark Dion created in collaboration with the PSU Art and Social Practice concentration.

The artists involved in Open Engagement: Making Things, Making Things Better, Making Things Worse, challenge our traditional ideas of what art is and does. These artist’s projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships, and tackle subject matter ranging from urban planning, alternative pedagogy, play, fiction, sustainability, political conflict and the social role of the artist.

Can socially engaged art do more harm than good? Are there ethical responsibilities for social art? Does socially engaged art have to do civic or public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability? As both urban planning and contemporary art imagine new worlds, how can art projects be seen as potential models for living?