Linked: The New Science of Networks

Yay for the UX book club! It's always nice to participate in such inspired discussions. This month we had a great conversation about networks as described by Barabasi. I had a desire to ask if anyone wanted to play Power Grid, but held myself back, not wanting to disturb the natural conversation with my non sequitur.

We talked a lot about the social aspects of networks, and twitter got mentioned pretty frequently. We drew a lot of lovely spiderwebby little graphs on the whiteboard walls at SVA. I found myself wondering how we could add a third dimension of fitness to the node and spoke diagrams. What would be the bet way to show change over time? There has to be a way to demonstrate trending. I think that we often see these kinds of visualizations as static, when in fact they only exist to illustrate a snapshot in time. I think most sociological concept graphics are like this. We recognize the connection, but not necessarily the health of the connection.