Driving the Dome

For eight weeks every Wednesday, Brett and I snuck away under darkness and rain to the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium to learn how to make a star show. We learned the ins and outs of the planetarium’s computer controls and presented shows for our family and friends on March 30th in the dome. A fellow classmate called it “playing with the biggest toy in New York City.”

Noreen and the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn
Showing the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn

Brett and the Earth's Magnetosphere
Brett and the Earth’s Magnetosphere



The program, Adult Digital Flight School, is a grown up version of a class that the museum’s education department created for school age children. The software, called Uniview Digital Universe, lets you display objects from moons and satellites to planets and galaxies to the large structure of the universe. It also has time and motion controls that allows the user to fly to selected objects and simulate the motion of the objects in space. You can examine the moon as it passes in front of the sun for a solar eclipse or watch the Cassini satellite make its initial 2004 approach of Saturn and then turn up the speed of time and watch ten years of the satellite’s orbits go by in seconds. It’s dizzying and took a lot of patience (and a little Dramamine) to feel in control of the “flight.”

The class structure included time in the classroom developing a program and time in the dome to test out the feel of the controls as your show is projected to the dome. And of course a lot of time at home researching our topic and writing our scripts. Each student selected very different study subjects. My topic as you may have guessed was the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. Brett studied aurora activity on the Earth and other planets in our solar system and the effect of the magnetosphere and nearby moons on auroras. We learned from our classmates about stellar distances, constellations, near Earth object collision risk, moon tides and life on the International Space Station. We also found out where the Borg live. [Spoiler Alert] Apparently, the S.S. Enterprise could only have traveled within the Milky Way Galaxy. Warp 8 just doesn’t get you very far.

Hayden_PlanetariumAMNH has a public version of the Uniview software that you can download from the Hayden Planetarium website. It was great fun and highly recommended if you ever get the urge to drive the dome.

If you would like to download the script from my exploration of the Cassini-Huygens mission, be my guest.

Update 06/09/2017: The Best of Cassini: 13 Years in Orbit Around Saturn, By Alan Taylor, The Atlantic, June 7, 2017.

Fall Projects: User Research

My Information Architecture class conducted a semester-long, group project to develop a website prototype for a small business or nonprofit group. My group, including Eleanor Meyer, Jan Diolola, Storey Radziunas and me, formed a group called Community Design and selected the West 104th Street Block Association as our client. Since I have a prior relationship with the block association as the caretaker of their digital newsletter repository, I had close access to members of the association board and the community and knew that their site was in desperate need of a facelift.

We each selected a different user population to study including senior citizens and older adults, families living in the neighborhood, young families considering a move to the neighborhood and couples without children. My group presented our design to the block association, who has agreed to adopt it for their next redesign. Next step is building the thing. Congrats, Team!

Read more about this project at my Pratt SILS E-Portfolio:

World IA Day: City Data

I had the chance to fill in for Andrew Nicklin, NYC Director of Research and Development at DoITT, at World IA Day on February 11, 2013. The event was held after Winter Storm Nemo hit the region. We had anticipated up to 330 attendees, but the storm knocked out commuter trains, and road conditions in New Jersey and upstate New York kept many home. Still, an unexpectedly large crowd of 130 came out to celebrate Information Architecture.

I presented an updated version of my IA for Emergency response presentation, this time focusing on the collection and dissemination of city data and community engagement and how information architects and design professionals can participate.

Information Architecture and City Data from Noreen Whysel

I am working on a collection of presentations and talk summaries that will be posted to the World IA Day website.

This Roadmap Could Use a GPS

I just finished reading Roadmap for the Digital City: Achieving New York City’s Digital Future (PDF 2.17MB). A glaring economic concern struck me, which the report acknowledges but does not address adequately, despite devoting several pages to it, and that is the issue of access by underserved populations.

Solutions offered by the plan include noble goals. Free wireless access in parks, training and services in public libraries, senior centers and public housing facilities, a pilot project to bring computing into the homes and schools of 18,000 sixth grade students. These programs directly address the cost of access and a disparity of technology learning in our community. I don’t want to discount these efforts, but do wish point out that the issue of access of the disadvantaged goes well beyond free wireless access.

It is disheartening to learn in the NY Times today that “free” Wi-Fi means, “The Wi-Fi in the parks would be free to all users for up to three 10-minute periods per month. Beyond that, users would pay 99 cents for each 24-hour period in which they log on.” The Times reports that, “It would be free to all subscribers to the broadband services of Cablevision or Time Warner,” which may include public housing where these services are available. In fact, the free Wi-Fi deal was a condition for renewing the cable franchise with the City. I would be interested in learning how many public housing residents are broadband subscribers with these services.

Here is another example: I have been providing computer training to an acquaintance who is a senior citizen and retired bookkeeper. She lives alone, is seeking employment, has worked with computers extensively in the past, but is about 15 years behind on the latest accounting technologies. She has a netbook with internet access but no mobile phone. For her, an iPhone app is useless and Twitter is bewildering (though she does like Facebook). Nothing really works the way she expects it to, including NYC.gov.

A large part of the Digital Roadmap involves community engagement through initiatives like PlaNYC’s Change By Us and the NYC Big Apps contest. Change By Us is a map-based website to collect thoughts from citizens about how to make New York City more livable. The NYC Big Apps Contest, an application development contest, sponsored by BMW, that invites developers to utilize open data collections from the City to address citizen needs, has indeed been a highly successful and exciting initiative raising awareness of engineering talent in NYC among the VC community and the technology industry at large. Keep in mind however, that it required an internet access to submit ideas to Change By Us and the Big Apps contest. So the citizenry making the requests are already connected.

The Digital Roadmap report notes challenges including staffing constraints and complicated legacy systems, and plans to a large degree to let its open government platform allow the developer community to create apps to address citizen needs, which they hope would be more cost effective than creating the services themselves. This crowdsourcing is indeed an effective way to get rapid development of products that the population actually wants and I am a big fan of the NYC Big Apps Contest. But while the Roadmap notes concern that the economically disadvantaged may not have access to the iPhones and Android technology that most of the Big Apps winners develop for, it’s the flashier apps that have the most appeal among those that are tuned into the contest.

There are competing needs at stake here. On one hand are the VC funders who want to earn money on apps that serve a deep pocketed consumer market and the developers who want to wow potential funders and employers with their mastery of the latest programs for the coolest toys. On the other are the City’s poor, senior citizens and those with developmental needs for which these toys may not be affordable, accessible or easy to use. The city is counting on corporate contract terms and good-hearted hackers to address citizen needs.

I understand that the City is forced to look to outside developers to serve these needs because tax revenue is so low. The strategy to open data and let developers come up with apps is a great way to provide services on a large scale, but not the best way to serve the needs of the underserved. And cutting inadequate deals with providers is more a way to say “We did it,” than to say “We did it right.” There needs to be an incentive for building apps for economically disadvantaged groups.

This all sounds very dreary. I should note that I am excited to see the level of engagement and openness in city government. After participating for 20 years in grass roots efforts to create an open discussion and sharing of public data, via my involvement with GISMO and the Municipal Arts Society’s Community Information Technology Initiative, it’s a step in the right direction.

But we can do more. And I’m working on an idea for involving my own developer community (IA, UX, GIS, etc) in coming up with a plan. If you are interested, please let me know.