This data sculpture created by Nilam Ram from the Studio|Lab team at Penn State University shows the evolution of cortisol levels for 34 people after they experienced a stressful situation. Source: Nilam Ram (2013) Cortisol Data Sculpture.

"How might we make data more tangible, persuasive, and persistent?" This was the challenge I posed to myself during my internship at IDEO Chicago. My answer is an artistic exploration made tangible through different design disciplines: data design, industrial design, and electrical engineering. The data for this exploration is the energy usage of the Chicago studio during 2015. An algorithm created with Grasshopper, a visual programming language, turned unfiltered data into a three-dimensional […]

Edo is a participatory data physicalization meant to enable a small community to track the carbon impact of their dietary choices. Each type of food item is represented as a token, a disk, whose surface area encodes the carbon impact of a typical portion of that type of food (data source: Agribalyse). After a meal, one can add data by selecting tokens for all the types of food one just consumed. For example, a burger with fries would require a beef token, a bread token, a salad token, and a […]

Carbon Scales is a low-tech data physicalisation of carbon emissions acribed to different phases of food production - agriculture, processing, packaging, and transport. People use Carbon Bits (i.e., 80-100g blocks made from wood, screws, bolts, and a binding agent) to touch and make sense of carbon emissions and place these bits on each platform of Carbon Scales to try and guess the emissions it takes to make and transport a specific food product. Source: Lindrup, M. V. A., Menon, A. R., & […]