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Lee Arnold sent me a link to 13 YouTube videos of presentations made using "Ecolanguage", an animated graphic language that provides a standard way of combining economics and ecology in the same image, using 25 symbols, organised into 6 categories. Below is a video that explains the language:
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Seb, Thanks for looking at this. It is easier to look at it, than to describe it...
It was developed over many years, out of a concern for the global environment. I studied systems philosophy from a different angle than usual -- a representative basic bibliography is listed down the side, at http://youtube.com/leearnold. The books by US ecologist Howard T. Odum (brother of Eugene) and the great British biological philosopher Gregory Bateson were very important to me.
Ecolanguage is adapted after Odum, who in turn had used the standard IEEE electrical diagram symbols, changing some for his own purposes in order to draw ecosystems. I changed several things again.
Ecolanguage standardizes meanings and accelerates comprehension, partly by taking advantage of visual motion. Also: (1) it uses some motions again and again, to become a part of its regular grammar, and (2) it makes the most basic hexagonal pattern into a part of syntax: always standing for "organization," i.e. directed organization (whether loosely or tightly directed,) at ANY level of nature and society.
Some of the next Ecolanguage videos are going to use real pictures and short, 1-2 sec. videos inside the symbols, to show what they stand for.
I have not written software to "make" Ecolanguage, although that's a possibility if enough people liked it and wanted to use it. But it would be even more rudimentary, because I use the full array of possible animated motions. I also use the full array of standard cinematic grammar: track, pan, zoom, cut, dissolve, etc.
Right now, the symbols are drawn in Adobe Illustrator and animated in Adobe After Effects. People tell me I could use Flash, but I started animating before Flash, and I love After Effects.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold | 24/05/2007 at 16:56