Revealing Paris Through Velib Data

A very interesting project by Fabien Girardin from the Interactive Technologies Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona

Velib is a community bicycle rental service in Paris (similar to the Vélo'v service in Lyon and Bicing in Barcelona). The stations deployed in the city offer bikes people can use for their small and medium daily routes within the city.

[...] As follow-up to the work on Bicing in Barcelona, Mathieu Arnold granted us access to  the infrastructure status (i.e. number of available bikes for each station) over several weeks. The resulting animation shows the spatio-temporal state of the system and the mobility patterns of its users. One intention behind these visualisation is to explore how accumulated data can help people to grasp the availability and quality of the system over space and time (e.g. do not expect to encounter available bikes the different neighborhoods at certain hours). In addition we aim at revealing Paris, the life of its different neighborhoods, specific areas, their topologies and dynamics through its bike system.

Images from The animation of these spatio-temporal data that reveals the pulse of the Velib' system over a full day (February 10, 2008) based on the number of bikes available at each station. see full video

Why do I blog this?

I find Fabien's work fascination and very relevant to what has been on my head for some time now. It is a great example of making sense of space in action. It makes me think of Lynch's notion of "imageability". Also of Dan Hill's ideas on urban computing and services and Kazys Varnelis' recent article on "The invisible city" highlighting the increasing reliance on maps to understand our new reality and the opportunities for designers in developing this new language.