Complaint Machine
Turning a consumer complaints database into a 3D exploration by state.
Summer into AI Week 3 is about creating punk themed data visualizations from data.gov.
The Complaint Machine aims to wrangle consumer complaints about credit reporting, debt collection, mortgages, vehicle loans, etc, into a discoverable experience per state.
Point and click on extruded state geometry to raise it up and read information about it. This sort of thing used to take weeks to accomplish at a former creative agency I worked at. Today we can just ask for such ideas to exist.
The Process
I asked Hermes to discover an interesting dataset from data.gov and pitch me a concept for my approval. It ran through a few ideas and we landed on this one. In general I find it better to be thankful than to complain, but this data is here so why not make something of it?
I talked with Hermes through a discord channel to dial in the final design and implementation. It focused on the core layout and data, while I focused on the top header design as well as the 3D scene interactivity direction. Hermes struggled to get a good perspective of the USA scene. I eventually asked to give me full scene control via mouse and keyboard, and write out all scene coordinates to screen. After dialing in the scene, I gave a screenshot of the debug coordinates to Hermes via Discord, and it locked in the design.