Last year, in Nicholas Felton’s information visualization class, we were given 1,000 runs of Nike+ data from the NYC area and worked to visualize it in a way that told a compelling story. You can view that project here.

Over the summer, Wired UK contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in doing a followup to the project, this time with 10,000 runners (some 6 million+ lines of data) in London. It was a great opportunity to further explore this running data, this time with a city I’m far less familiar with, which led to some really fun discoveries in the data. In the end, we decided on this heat map direction.

I also worked with them to concept around what the iPad version should show. We decided to render 24 separate heat maps, one for each hour of the day, allowing the user the ability to scrub back and forth through the day. Lots of interesting insights here, but definitely the most interesting is how people stop running through parks at 7 pm. My hypothesis is that runners no longer feel safe in these parks once it becomes dark. 

I hope to do a more thorough writeup on my portfolio site this week. In the meantime, UK friends keep an eye out for the November issue. My Fellow Americans, worry not, you can still grab the iPad version here

Posted at 11:09am and tagged with: dataviz, wired, nikeplus,.