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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Map of the Market
Martin Wattenberg,
Joon Yu
Original: PR_1999_mapmarket_001_o.jpg | 1797 * 1246px | 1.5 MB
Concept
We set out to create a visual answer to the question, “How is the market doing today?” Given the powerful global influence of the U.S. stock market, this question has relevance not just for investors but for anyone seeking to understand the news of the day.
Our Design
We display the market in the form of colored rectangular tiles, one for each of 600 key U.S. companies. The size of each tile corresponds to a company’s total market value, giving the viewer a sense of perspective and proportion. We represent price movement by shades of red and green, and group similar companies together to help viewers perceive trends. The result is a colorful and intuitive picture in which bright spots in the market show up as literal bright spots on the screen, conveying the mood of the market—and by extension of the economy and the country—at a glance.
Visual Ramifications
Aside from communicating financial information, the display represents an exploration of twodimensional space in the spirit of Piet Mondrian. The tilings of different sectors of the economy demonstrate dozens of different ways to partition rectangles into subspaces.
History
The Map was launched by SmartMoney.com on Dec. 16, 1998. Our design builds on earlier work by Ben Shneiderman and others on a visualization technique called a “treemap.” Aside from adding aesthetic variations on their theme, we also invented a new algorithm for creating the space-filling partition of the diagram.
We set out to create a visual answer to the question, “How is the market doing today?” Given the powerful global influence of the U.S. stock market, this question has relevance not just for investors but for anyone seeking to understand the news of the day.
Our Design
We display the market in the form of colored rectangular tiles, one for each of 600 key U.S. companies. The size of each tile corresponds to a company’s total market value, giving the viewer a sense of perspective and proportion. We represent price movement by shades of red and green, and group similar companies together to help viewers perceive trends. The result is a colorful and intuitive picture in which bright spots in the market show up as literal bright spots on the screen, conveying the mood of the market—and by extension of the economy and the country—at a glance.
Visual Ramifications
Aside from communicating financial information, the display represents an exploration of twodimensional space in the spirit of Piet Mondrian. The tilings of different sectors of the economy demonstrate dozens of different ways to partition rectangles into subspaces.
History
The Map was launched by SmartMoney.com on Dec. 16, 1998. Our design builds on earlier work by Ben Shneiderman and others on a visualization technique called a “treemap.” Aside from adding aesthetic variations on their theme, we also invented a new algorithm for creating the space-filling partition of the diagram.
Martin Wattenberg, 29, lives and works in New York City. He is an editor at SmartMoney.com, where he designs new ways of visualizing financial data and news. His work has received recognition including the ICI/American University award for personal finance journalism in 1998 and 1999, and an I.D. Magazine gold award for interactive design in 1999. He also maintains an experimental interactive art web site, www.bewitched.com. Before coming to SmartMoney in 1996, he graduated ifrom U.C. Berkeley with a PhD in mathematics.
Joon Yu, a graduate of Cooper Union, has been with SmartMoney.com for over two years. During this time, Joon has been instrumental in shaping the entire look and feel of the SmartMoney.com Web site. As lead designer on numerous projects, he has received design awards from IDSA, ID Magazine, the Investment Company Institute and Communication Arts.
Joon Yu, a graduate of Cooper Union, has been with SmartMoney.com for over two years. During this time, Joon has been instrumental in shaping the entire look and feel of the SmartMoney.com Web site. As lead designer on numerous projects, he has received design awards from IDSA, ID Magazine, the Investment Company Institute and Communication Arts.