Week 8: Playaround NYC

Noel Billig is a Technical Creative Director at R/GA. They are an agency that are involved with anything to do with technology. Ad Campaigns, visual design, building apps and much more. Visit their site for more.


Noel has a blog called DoesNotCompute. Here I discovered his latest post which is an app he created which visualises New York city playgrounds. It was submitted to the NYC Big Apps contest. The visualisations are based off each playgrounds rating.

"The first step was assigning playgrounds a quality rating. Currently quality is determined by nearness to major and minor truck routes. Major truck routes cause a slightly greater loss in quality than minor truck routes. Major truck routes affect playgrounds within 300 meters while minor truck routes only affect playgrounds within 200 meters. "

Other steps are used to determine the apps rating of a playground.
"The second step involves sampling points regularly on the map. The nearest playgrounds, walking distance to these playgrounds, and the quality of these playground are then determined. These factors are combined to assign each point an overall rating which estimates how well that area is supported by playgrounds.

Next, the various support ratings are interpolated to generate the PLAYAROUNDNYC playground support map."