Description
Anemone is a project that uses the process of Organic Information Design to make this set of problems more approachable. Data from the Aesthetics and Computation Group’s web site was used as input in the examples shown here. Rules for growth can govern the creation of new branches of structure within the site. Atrophy rules decay unused areas, eventually removing them. Individual web pages can call attention to themselves as they are visited more rapidly than others. A set of rules governing movement can group related areas.
Individual branches grow based on input from the data. As the Preprocessor Engine reads the usage log, a reproduction rule causes branches to grow whenever parts of the site are visited for the first time. This avoids the problem of having to keep track of what pages are added to or removed from the site. Using the usage data to create an implicit model of structure is a common theme in Organic Information Design. To balance growth is the notion of ‘atrophy’. Branches associated with areas of the site that have not been visited will slowly wither away, causing them to visually thin out. Eventually the branches die, and are removed from the system.
