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Tech smarts, human smarts

Mon, September 8th, 2008 by Jamie Folsom | 0 comments

Hard data were not, for the most part, readily evident in the television coverage of the recent national conventions of the two major US political parties. In fairness, it’s hard to gather reliable data. It’s harder still to know what those data are telling you. The latter is at least part of what political coverage aims to do.

In the convention coverage on CNN, Fox, PBS, and others, there was a large amount of commentary, leavened only periodically by demographic or public opinion data. One of the most interesting approaches to parsing those data, when it did make an appearance, was the appearance on CNN of a technology more widely popularized by the iPhone, called “multitouch”.

Developed by a company called Perceptive Pixel, CNN’s large-screen US map is controlled by a person’s gestures. Here is a demonstration.

There are at least two aspects of multitouch that are interesting, beyond its remarkable appearance, and its dramatic imagery.

• Multitouch is fundamentally a user-interface innovation: a person can interact with information on a screen using hand gestures that also work on the physical world: pushing, pulling, twisting, squeezing, and so forth.
• Multitouch doesn’t use computing power to interpret the data for us; it lets us sift, sort, pan, zoom, slice and dice information rapidly, and leaves interpretation to us and our visual cortices.

Especially in the case of the data CNN presents with it (past election results maps, essentially), data are often readily available. Multitouch is a tool that helps address that second, more difficult challenge posed when we’re trying to quantify or visualize social or political phenomena: not how to gather the data, but how to see what it means.

At 720 Strategies, we’re in the business of helping you both to gather data, and to see and use your data more effectively. Both of the virtues of multitouch guide design and development of our tools and services: tech smarts and human smarts, to which I would add: knowing how to integrate the two effectively.

Questions our tools can help you ask:

• “who are we reaching?”
• “what communication modalities do they prefer?”
• “where are they located?”
• “what catches their attention?”

...and many more. Get in touch for a demonstration of our tools for sifting, sorting, slicing and dicing the answers.

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