There are so many ways this kind of creativity can go and probably so much undiscovered talent, it’s still early days in what will be some great work in years to come.

Obviously Aarons new work moving into data creation rather than creating visualisations that are a by-product of data collected for other purposes brings a whole new dimension to data visualisation what can seriously expand the creative scope of what could be achieved.

Frankly too cool, wish I had been there.

Somehow that is not something I expected someone like Aaron to say – I mean, he’s pretty young himself and one would imagine he’d actually look forward to being able to record everything in his life, as with Daytum. But there’s a pearl of wisdom hidden in what he says – sometimes we (i.e people from the marketing/ design/ advertising industries) get so caught up in ooh-ing and aah-ing over these brilliant data visualizations that we forget that there are some things that are better off just not being visualized.

Having said that, I still love seeing data visualized – as long as the general direction of most data visualization is not just to create something beautiful (which is nice) but also useful. I think Aaron’s flight pattern visualization work was fascinating from that point of view, while things like the Mechanical Turk-related projects are fun to see, but not necessarily very useful (except maybe as an illustration of how the wisdom of the crowds is better than that of the individual). Still, I see those as stepping stones to something bigger.