Interview with Sinan Ascioglu:
OpenProcessing Architect

By Tim Stutts on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 1:00 pm.

“Driving through Iceland” sketch by dotlassie. Winner of Rhizome’s Tiny Sketch Competition.
OpenProcessing.org is a site that has built a community around sharing visual coding examples created in Processing. As user number 36, I had the unique privilege of watching the idea take shape, while in a thesis group with Sinan at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. During it’s first two years of activity, the site has grown to host thousands of user-generated sketches and subsequent conversations between artists / programmers, teachers, and students from around the world. Sinan and I escaped the snow recently at a café outside Washington Square Park to discuss OpenProcessing’s origins, Rhizome’s collaboration with OpenProcessing in the Tiny Sketch competition, and what we can expect for the future. – Tim Stutts

Tim: How did you first come up with the idea for OpenProcessing?

Sinan: I guess the first thing to talk about is OpenVisuals, which was my Master’s thesis project at ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University). I was reading Edward Tufte’s books at the time, and I became very interested in data visualization. In the meantime …. read more on Rhizome

The roots of OpenProcessing is linked to my thesis project at ITP, NYU. When I developed OpenVisuals, open source visualization framework, it allowed Processing users to easily upload and share their sketches that have visualization focus. In its beta stage, I realized a strong need for ‘flickr’ish place in the Processing community, and OpenVisuals was technically supporting such a structure within its functionality.

Design Process

So, I took OpenVisuals as a template, but took the data visualization concept out. I did couple of user testings to see if it serves well for the group of Processing enthusiasts, and defined my production strategy to enable this tool for the community first, and design further solutions incrementally following the user feedback and observing user behavior.

At the first phase, having set the first priority to providing this sharing tool with its adequate functionality, I kept things minimal: By the time of the launch, website included only 4 sections (homepage, browse, visual page, register/upload), and 1 image (for the homepage). After testing the functionality with couple of recruited users, the number of hits made its first spike when Daniel Shiffman blogged the project on his website.

Since then, the design of the website had been continously improved and updated by observing the user behavior through analytics, feedback and overall website usage.

Recently

Through 2+ years since it’s been live, OpenProcessing.org became the second most-visited site of resource for Processing community, following Processing.org. It became a great library of amazing sketches, source code and communication within the community. With its increasing traffic, the site is currently serving more than 2000 visitors a day, accounting for half a million pageviews a month. It had been named and linked by thousands of websites, including Wired.com.

Read what Bruce Sterling says about OpenProcessing here, here and here.

The Killer Feature: Classrooms

I will soon update here with some info.

Afterthoughts

Since then, OpenProcessing had one major redesign, and additional functionalities such as comments, source code view, rss feeds, tags and tag subscriptions, user profiles. In the long run, I am exploring the options to make OpenProcessing more functional for teaching purposes: Processing is used in many platforms to teach programming within visual context, visualization, dfx, etc… OpenProcessing can be a great tool to gather students together to improve their learning experience and collaboration.

Having raised a lot of attention in the recent years, data visualization proved itself to be an important subject to provide better understanding of data and information which cover a wide spectrum from data-intense scientific researches to election results. Most of the times, and except pie charts and bar graphs, good data visualizations are designed and tailored for a specific data set, and are not necessarily available publicly to be used with different data sets. This limits the potential of visualizations to be used in different purposes.

A simple user scenerio is:

>> A person interested in visualizing a data uploads the data set to the website. She browses the website and picks a visualization to visualize his/her data. In the meantime, She allows her data set to be used by anyone under Creative Commons License.

>> A visualization artist finds this data very interesting. He copy/pastes the given piece of library code to Processing and starts building his own visualization using that data set. The library allows him to access the data set that is in the cloud. Once he is done, he uploads his visualization to the website to share with others. In the mean time, the library he used makes his visualization possible to work with other data sets on the website with this visualization through the website.

This framework includes two assets:

• The website, OpenVisuals.org, which supports the framework as the place for people to upload, browse data and visualizations, to explore by mapping the data sets to visualization, and to communicate with each other using commenting, messaging, etc…

OpenVisuals Thesis Presentation from
Sinan Ascioglu on Vimeo.

• OpenVisuals Java Library, which is an API for Processing to make building visualizations easier by providing common functions. Also, this library functions as the bridge to map any uploaded visualization to any data set on the website.

This project can be considered as the ‘visualization counterpart’ of many data websites (eg. Swivel, Many Eyes, Gapminder), making it possible for users to develop and collaborate on the visualizations end.

The Fail Part

While working on this website, I preferred to design and develop while it was live on the web: anybody could see the website being developed on the fly. This gave me a great opportunity to get early feedback on the features, design and bugs. The most significant feedback that I had was to make the website open to any Processing sketch, and be less specific rather then focusing on the visualization theme. Before any visualization-sharing website, Processing users needed a place to share any of their sketches.

Upon this observation, I copy/pasted the whole website under a new domain, OpenProcessing.org, and stripped out the visualization&dataset focus by redesigning couple of pages. Since then, OpenProcessing has welcomed by the community with great interest and appreciation, and this led me to discontinue my efforts on OpenVisuals.org and put all my energy on OpenProcessing. Well, the rest of the OpenProcessing story is here.