California-based artist Loren Madsen, a long-time data sculptor (see our 1995 entry and our interview with him), created an outdoor sculpture where steel tubes show falling crime rates across eight crime categories over 30 years. The sculpture stands in front of a police station and jail in Chicago City. Sources: ​Healther Schultz (2015) California Sculptor Completes Commissioned Piece. Image courtesy of Loren Madsen. Also see Steven Pinker's TED Talk on the topic.

Harassment Plants is a situated physicalization exhibited in a Brazilian city to represent stories of harassment experienced by women in a public lakeside. Each vase represents a different category of harassment and contains glyphs that represent cases of harassment. The color in the middle of the vase corresponds to the type of harassment, which is also represented by the same color in one of the beads. Each glyph is composed of a rod — whose length represents the time of the day the […]

Winner of the National Geographic and Sky Ocean Ventures Ocean Plastic Innovation Challenge [This project] highlights the scope of the plastic problem (in terms of amount produced as well as its fate) and the transformation of plastic over its lifetime, using beach debris as a salient example. The situated, participatory data installation approach extends abstract displays of numbers towards a more gripping form of ‘data visceralization.’ The direct link to beach clean-up activities suggests […]

   A physical conference badge that participants create themselves during an event by assembling tokens on a wearable canvas. The process is guided by an instruction sheet that helps translate the tokens to various professional characteristics. Sources: Tweet from Andre Vande Moere. Georgia Panagiotidou, Sinem Gorucu, Andrew Vande Moere (2020) Data Badges: Making an Academic Profile Through a DIY Wearable Physicalization. Related: Also see our entries on data jewellery and data […]

PlanetWalker is a public physicalization displayed in an open workplace, using a mosaic art style to present the walking activity of 16 co-located users over four weeks. The mosaic patterns were pre-designed based on the eight planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), symbolizing exploration and representing individual users. It encouraged participants to walk 7,500 steps per day. This daily goal was divided into ten small goals, each represented by a colored […]

Making the Invisible Visible is a project that tracks cyclists’ routes throughout the city and transforms this data into three-dimensional sculptures that double as public bike repair stations. These sculptural objects not only enhance public space and act as reference points for urban navigation, but also invite cyclists to reflect on bicycle movement across Quito (Ecuador) while repairing their bikes. Sources: Barriga-Abril, X., Vivanco, J., Rosas, C., Medina, X., Aulestia, A., & […]