Seattle Band Map Redesign
We propose a redesign of the Seattle Band Map (seattlebandmap.com), a visualization of crowd-sourced data about Pacific Northwest bands and the connections between them. The current visualization is difficult to navigate and is not organized in a way that supports exploration or discovery. Our redesign began by rethinking the process of how users explore the graph. We focused on clustering the bands in meaningful ways to generate points of interest on the graph, adding interaction to guide the exploration experience, and enhancing the dataset to create a rich, multimedia experience. We created a proof of concept that allows users to listen to audio samples, filter bands by date range or genre, and view relationships between bands based on different characteristics. For our project, we used a subset of 521 bands.
Many music discovery and artist collaboration visualizations effectively reduce large networks by having the user input a band or song and generating a graph of related data points. Rather than having the user input a starting point, we use the shape of the network to prompt exploration and allow for broader discovery. This challenged us to find new ways to organize the data and to give users enough control to navigate the global view as well as identify and focus in on points or areas of interest.
Visualization
Try it online here.
