Yu Liu – Design Informatics | Titi Luo – Advanced Design Informatics | Roxana Karam – Architecture
How physicalization communicates and elicits reflections on data with the power of biology?
Data is ubiquitous and invisible. The interaction using ubiquitous data looks like the way that we are interacting with the physical world. There are many different ways to visualize data in a digital way, but physical visualization has been demonstrated which is more efficient than on-screen representation for data visualization with more memorable or engaging. Physicalization is a better way to communicate and elicit reflection on data.
There are many bioluminescence in nature, from octopus, mushroom to bacteria. Due to its controllability, bioluminescence can be acted as a media to visualize data. Oxygen is the leading factor. The brightness depends on the level of oxygen. We used a kind of bacteria bioluminescence from sea life called “Dinoflagellates” and designed our installation, which looks like a jellyfish-shaped lamp with many drop-water shaped containers. In each container, it is full of”Dinoflagellates”. This installation can be put in the public area. We extracted health data from user’s mobile devices. Depending on the number of health data, we controlled the level of oxygen provided using IoT, as a result, it can express different brightness to show users’ health data.
