Data Driven Objects
This is a diagram of a brief set by Russell Davies when he visited students at the the AHO Instititute of Design in Oslo last October. It encapsulates so much of what I find exciting about the potential for “post digital” thinking.
Data driven manufacturing. How cool is that?
In the future when we have all these smart objects logging and reporting an infinite amount of data about us and our surroundings as part of The Internet of Things how are we going to view all that information in a way that’s not just graphs and charts behind glass on a screen?
What if you hooked something like Withings or Nike+ up to a ‘fabber’ (3D printer). Something capable of turning digital input into real tangible output? What if you could hook up entire factories to datasets?
Think about it for a bit.
Cool isn’t it?
There’s already Newspaper Club which is allowing people to output to a full newspaper printing press. It’s in beta at the moment but I can’t wait to see what people end up doing with it.
This is a data driven newspaper. It’s a demo of what could be generated using open government data specific to a London postcode.
(Photo by Tom T on Flickr)
I love this work by Svein Inge Bjørkhaug (one of the students at AHO). It uses small wooden blocks to represent the time you spend using applications on your computer. Each week you get these small blocks in the post.
- More time on an application = bigger block.
- More applications = more blocks.
(Photo by jørngeorg on Flickr)
I also love Datadecs by RIG for the same reason. They’re Christmas decorations made from snapshots of data frozen in time and there’s something fascinating about that. It’s almost the opposite of digital photography.
(Photo by Ben Terrett on Flickr)
As you can probably tell I’m completely sold on the concept of “post digital” thinking and I desperately want to do something useful with it. I just hope I get to work on some projects that allow me to think in this way.
If you know anyone…
