Upgrade! Wellington: Tag Orbitals- Social Networks: The Close Distance by Bernard Kerr :: November 14, 2007; 7:00 pm; School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ.

Bernard Kerr is a Senior Interaction Designer at Yahoo! and is currently the lead designer of the social bookmarking service, Delicious. Prior to working at Yahoo!, he was a Strategic Designer at IBM Research where his research focused on designing advanced concept software applications and visualizations for collaboration. One of the significant projects he worked on while at IBM was “Remail”, which centered on reinventing the email experience. This work has been published in various places, including the Infovis and CHI conferences.

Bernard is also passionate about physical computing, emergent systems and product design. While studying for his MA at the Royal College of Art in London, he designed and built a number of prototypes which explored these themes. During his time in the Computer Related Design program, he developed his interaction design skills and became an expert in rapid software and hardware prototyping techniques. His knowledge and skills were given a tremendous boost when he gained an internship at the famous Interval Research Labs in Palo Alto. His original three month internship was expanded into an intensive one and a half year stay which exposed him to a wealth of ideas, technologies and experts in Silicon Valley.

Many visualizations have been designed to show the relationships between message threads in email and, more recently, an increasing number have been invented to show the relationships of tags in systems like the social networking site, Del.icio.us. The result is often an incomprehensible tangled network of lines and dots. Thread Arcs and Tag Orbitals take two very different approaches to these problems. This presentation will describe the development of both of these visualizations and the interesting design techniques used in their development.