Anymails

Anymails is a project by Carolin Horn from Germany. It's a visualization of received emails. Emails are pictured as microbes. The project was developed during the MFA thesis 'Natural Metaphor For Information Visuzalization' at the Dynamic Media Intitute Boston in 2007.

How a microbe looks and moves depends on the condition of the represented email. The age of an email (when it was received) is shown by the size and opacity of the animal. For instance, a new email is big and opaque, an old email small and transparent. The status of an email (unread, read, responded) is shown by two animal attributes: the number of hair/feet and velocity. An unread email is hairy and swims fast; a read email has less hair and does not swim so fast anymore; a responded email is hairless and barely moves.