Tag: Digital Fabrication

2014 – Rearrangeable Display of Ice Data

This 3d data visualization, created by Johannes Jacubasch and Judith Weda, shows sea ice levels from 1979 to 2012. The years are plotted on one axis and the months on the other axis, while the height of the wooden pieces shows the level of sea ice. This data visualization can be opened up at any year or month to view the data from up close. If you break the Y-axis it shows all the data from a particular year. If the X-axis is broken it shows ice levels of a particular month over all the years. […]



2015 – Wage Islands

The "Wage Islands" installation by Ekene Ijeoma makes clever use of water as a data query device. Wage Islands is an interactive installation which submerges a topographic map of NYC underwater to visualize where low-wage workers can afford to rent. Sources: Ekene Ijeoma: Wage Islands Huffington Post: Dazzling Interactive 3-D Artwork Visualizes The Tragic Affordable Housing Crisis In New York City Creators: Turning New York's Salary Gap into an Interactive Sculpture Design Boom: Wage islands […]

Added by: Cedric Honnet, sent by: Cheng Xu. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: cartographic, digital fabrication, physical computation, water


2015 – U.S. Unemployment Rate 1948-2015

Visual journalist Jon Keegan created this quick chart using U.S. unemployment rate starting from January 1948 (the first year that the U.S. started to record the number) through the end October 2015. The long axis represents years from 1948-2015, and each column is made of of 12 chips, each representing one month's unemployment rate figure. The height of each chip represents the rate for that month. One can see a dramatic cliff start to rise up in the fall of 2008, as the global economic […]



2015 – Summer in the City

The visualization explores the direct influence of weather and traffic volume on air pollution, comparing data of a 4-week period during summer 2015 in Lugano (Switzerland). Different colored laser cut plates fixed on wires represent daily data. As the wires are diagonally mounted on the structure, looking from different sides, they evidence either daily data or the evolution of the parameters. Source: Carola Bartsch (2015), Summer in the city



2016 – Thoughtforms: 3D-Printed Thoughts

Kellyann Geurts and In Dae Hwang, Monash University, give physical shape to thoughts by turning EEG data into solid objects. During three public events at Melbourne in 2016, she placed a mobile EEG device on volunteers and asked them to think of a memory or emotion of their choice. Their EEG output was translated in real time into a 3D shape they could see on a computer screen. Participants could then press a button to pause the shape and send it to a 3D printer. They were then invited to write […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic, sent by: Benjamin Bach. Category: Passive physical visualization  Tags: 3d printing, digital fabrication, EEG, thoughts


2016 – Actuated Prism Map of Italy

This actuated prism map was created by Alessandro Masserdotti in the OpenDot Fablab in Milan, Italy, for the SOD16 meeting and invites people explicitly to Touch That Data. OpenDot Fablab (Milan) project with Arduino and 3D printing visualizes regional statistics changing the height of each region. In the picture there's the building count from the regional extracts. Sources: Open streetmap wiki, 2016. Video from a demo at OSMIT 2016.

Added by: Yvonne Jansen, sent by: Jason Dykes. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: 3d printing, cartographic, digital fabrication, prism map


2016 – Central Park NYC Temperatures

Seasonal plot of the monthly average temperature in Central Park NYC since 1869. The long axis is mapped to years, the other axis is mapped to months from January to December. Data sourced from the National Weather Service. Source: RoundTableRdDesign on shapeways.

Added by: Kris Dawsey. Category: Passive physical visualization  Tags: digital fabrication, temperatures, weather


2017 – Fabricating Physical Globe Visualizations

Geospatial datasets are too complex to easily visualize and understand on a computer screen. Combining digital fabrication with a discrete global grid system (DGGS) can produce physical models of the Earth for visualizing multiresolution geospatial datasets. This proposed approach includes a mechanism for attaching a set of 3D printed segments to produce a scalable model of the Earth. Two models have been produced that support the attachment of different datasets both in 2D and 3D format. […]

Added by: Hessam Djavaherpour. Category: Enabling technology  Tags: 3d printing, cartographic, digital fabrication, globe, rearrangeable


2018 – Landscaper: 3D Printing and Assembling of Terrain Models

Landscape models of geospatial regions provide an intuitive mechanism for exploring complex geospatial information. However, the methods currently used to create these scale models require a large amount of resources, which restricts the availability of these models to a limited number of popular public places, such as museums and airports. Landscaper is a system for creating these physical models using an affordable 3D printer in order to make the creation of these models more widely […]

Added by: Hessam Djavaherpour. Category: Enabling technology  Tags: 3d printing, assembly, digital fabrication, terrain model


2019 – Physicalizing Cardiac Blood Flow Data

Blood flow data from cardiac 4D Flow MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) holds much potential for research and diagnosis of flow-related diseases. However, understanding this data is quite challenging – after all, it is a volumetric vector field that changes over time. This paper proposes a novel slice-based physical model as a complementary method for visualizing the flow data. The design of this model respects the conventional method of viewing medical imagery (i.e., in cross-sections) but has […]