Competition 2018: Nominated in the category Research

MAD RIDES

Fabio Galicia, 2018
Area Mobility Culture Medium Information Visualization Infographic Animation Type Research ArtAdvocacy

This is MAD RIDES, a data visualization project that made an Architect living in London and a Computer Scientist from Madrid meet and work together remotely to unravel and show 300k+ bike rides that took place in their native city between the months of March and April 2017, creating the first interactive dataviz project with public bike and built-environment data in the city of Madrid.

The primal matter comes from a variety of Open Data sources from different vendors: Transport Authorities, City of Madrid (a wonderful catalog), OSM, National Institute of Statistic, National Geographic Institute?

The whole project has been done with a modern stack of FOSS4G and presented in an interactive, animated website. We sought to deliver it in a user-friendly way, rather than in a hard-core academic tone, so to make it more inclusive: for a wide range of people generated the data that we show here - and we owe them.

We have pursued a certain depth of analysis that goes beyond the pure mapping: We have sought interpretation through visual and quantitative means, we have identified recognisable clusters of users and shown how they experience Madrid quite differently, drawn by different interests. We have tried to shed some light on the intricate matter that makes up this polis, in what we like to call an exercise of modern anthropology. By unveiling hundreds of thousands of traces, we might arrive at clues that, if framed within the complexities that make up a city, could yield a draft of how we interface with our environment.

We hope you find this exercise compelling.
You can read further about our motivation and methodology in our #about page:

https://madrides.in/about.html

Links

Authors

  • Javier Ramírez
  • Fabio Galicia