Warning - Real Time Global Air Quality Display: case study of digital art and public spaces

Warning - Real Time Global Air Quality Display: case study of digital art and

public spaces

October 7, 2014 Boston

Northeastern University

Rodrigo Medeiros

My timeline of studies in Information Design and Visualization

2005-2011

Rodrigo Medeiros Assistant Professor, IFPB, Design

PhD Candidate, UFPE, Computer Science

October 7, 2014 Boston

Northeastern University

Background

•  Undergraduate: Web Design or system for web •  MBA: Information Design •  Master: Technology and Digital Art, Universidade do

Minho •  PhD candidate: Computer Science, Universidade Federal

de Pernambuco

4 Warning -‐ Real Time Global Air Quality Display

Background

•  Amazing and crazy Master class: Sergio Soares, Rui Ribeiro and Pedro Angelo.

•  Masters without scholarship or family financial support •  Budget for my final project: EUR 150 / Others students’

final project: EUR 900 •  Opensource Hardware and Software



Warning - Real Time Global Air Quality Display: case study of digital art and

public spaces

Warning – real time global air quality display

Warning - Real Time Global Air Quality Display is an installation of ambient display that receives data from the internet about the air quality in 30 cities in 5 continents. The installation of these data is dynamically displayed on a screen and a physical structure through a lighting system (LED) located in a public space.


Motivation

•  Digital aesthetics of climate change (Pold, 2010) –  Artworks in digital art involving the issue of the

environment as a theme.

•  Eco-visualization (Holmes, 2007) –  can be defined as animations controlled by data that

show any kind of environmental information in real-time.


state of the art – art in public space

•  Art of the City -> outside the museums -> everyday life

•  Late 1960s: crisis of traditional exhibition spaces (museums and galleries)



Reference: Andrade (2010).

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WORK LEISURE

PRIVATE SPACE

PUBLIC SPACE

MARGINAL PUBLIC ART

street

AMATEUR PRIVATE ART

PRO PRIVATE ART

LEGITIMATE PUBLIC ART social exclusion

degraded urban neighborhood

local associations

marginal groups

neighborhood community

Group of friends

family

inhabitants artists

artwork

local economy

atelier

pro staff

workplace

collections

private patrons

art market

social inclusion

Local administration

Public / audience

Gallery / Museum /

cyberspace Central state

L.A.S.E.R Tagging System , Rotterdam, 2007

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Vectorial Elevation at Cidade do México by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, 2000

Body Movies Relational Architecture 6 by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, 2002

BIX, Austria, 2003


•  The information visualization aims to expand knowledge through the development of effective visual metaphors for mapping abstract data (Card; Mackinlay; Shneiderman, 1999).


state of the art – information visualization

raw data > visual mapping > visualization

•  “Information Visualization is abstract data communication through the use of interactive visual interfaces” (Keim et al, 2006)

•  “uses computer graphics and interaction to help humans in solving problems” (Purchase et al, 2008).




History Flow for keyword Capitalism at Wikipedia by Viégas and Wattenberg, 2003.


16 Model of information aesthetics by Lau e Vande Moere (2007).


Van Moere and Offenhuber (2009) propose a classification for alternative display of information.

•  Ambient display

•  Object augmentation

•  Data sculpture / Pixel sculpture

17 Warning -‐ Real Time Global Air Quality Display Heatsink (Bonanni et al, 2005). DataFountain (van Mensvoort, 2004). Mirror Wooden (Rozin, 1999).


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Ballon Air Paris

E-cloud

In the air

•  Air quality •  Air quality index:

• Carbon monoxide (CO) • Nitrogen dioxide / nitrogen (NO2) • Sulfur dioxide (SO2) • Ozone (03) •  Fine particles and inhalable particles.


warning– concept


1.  Construction and structure of installation 2.  Definition and validation of display parameters 3.  Hardware Development 4.  Software Development 5.  Critical analysis


Warning – Steps

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Warning – Steps - Construction and structure of installation


Warning – Steps - Construction and structure of installation

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•  Chromatic scale proposed by me

•  Validation (two sessions of card sorting)

•  Comparison with existing scales (final scale):

Warning -‐ Real Time Global Air Quality Display

Warning – Steps - Definition and validation of display parameters

Best air quality Worst air quality

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•  Analysis of proposals:

•  Implemented solution

Warning – Steps –

Hardware Development

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Final solution A major challenge: A lot of DIY and lost wires.



Software Development

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Installation



Installation



Installation



video

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4 people for one week: •  More time for dynamic visualization; •  Debate about air quality; •  Recalled the most general images of clouds; •  Leaves the space more welcoming; •  More works of this kind in public space;

Warning -‐ Real Time Global Air Quality Display


Critical analysis

Possibilities

•  The art and technology in encouraging debate on environmental issues.

•  Lack of global standardization of air quality index.

•  Looking beyond the traditional use of the screen as an interface.


Positive Hypothesis

•  Interface non-screen-based + softwares and hardwares open-source -> new aesthetic experiences built and coded with low cost.


Future work

•  Wireless LEDs

•  Research on another alternative display

•  Projects with environmental subject

•  More public and standardized databases among governments / international institutions


Obrigado! www.rodrigomedeiros.com.br/warning

@medeiros_rod

[email protected] 45

References

•  Andrade, Pedro de. (2010). Arte pública versus arte privada? Alteridades artítica urbana e web 2.0. In Arte Pública e Cidadania: Calesdoscopio, Lisboa.

•  Card, S; Mackinlay, J.D.; Shneiderman, B. (1999). Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think. Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos, CA.

•  Holmes, Tiffany. (2007). Eco-visualization: Combining Art and Technology to Reduce Energy Consumption. C&C’07, June 13–15, 2007, Washington, DC, USA.

•  Keim, D..; Mansmann, F.; Schneidewind, J.; Ziegler, H.. (2006). Challenges in Visual Data Analysis. Proceedings of Information Visualization (IV 2006), IEEE, p. 9-16, 2006.

•  Lau, A.; Vande Moere, A.. (2007). Towards a Model of Information Aesthetic Visualization. IEEE International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV'07), IEEE, Zurich , Switzerland, pp. 87-92.

•  Pold, Søren Bro. (2010). The Digital Aesthetics of Climate Crisis. In: Funke, Judith; Riekeles, Stefan; Broeckmann, Andreas; MedinKunsVerein, Hartware. (2010). ISEA2010 RUHR, 16th International Symposium on Electronic Art. Ruhr, Germany.

•  Purchase, H; Andrienko, N.; Jankun-Kelly, T. J.; Ward, M.. (2008). Theoretical Foundations of Information Visualization. In: Kerren, A., Stasko, J. T., Fekete, J., North, C. (2008). Information Visualization: Human-Centered Issues and Perspectives. Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 4950. Springer- Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 46-64.

•  Vande Moere, A.; Offenhuber, D. (2009) Beyond Ambient Display: A contextual taxonomy of alternative information display. Information Journal of Ambient Computing and Inteligence, 1(2), 39-46, April-June.

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