Calculated from 10 years of callout data, the fire department from Ulvenhout, Netherlands commissioned a new piece of art to visualize their history. The station is located along a stretch of highway and so the pattern of incidents rendered in two-dimensional space are largely West to East. Actions are represented by circles and located on the exact geographical position where the accident or fire happened.

Data is beautiful.

(See also: DATAVISUALIZATION.CH: Graffiti Meets Visualization)

Ford is at the top of the art. Distractions are low and the interface assumes the user is smart. Flanking displays on the Fusion hybrid interface are configurable. The growing vine on the right gives the user an indication of their driving economy.

Here is the Explorer (not a hybrid, but beautifully rendered).

The Edge, with both the dash and the Sync interface.

A very cohesive design. A consistent thought. Glancing through the other offerings from the Detroit Auto Show no other company comes close to Ford in user configurability. In other news it will be interesting to see if Tesla ultimately does something novel with their interface. Currently what Tesla offers in real estate they squander with chunky design.

Informative, functional, configurable. Automobile dashboards present a worthy design problem.

(See also: Tesla: Gallery)