“Rows of motorised measuring tapes record the amount of time that visitors stay in the installation. As a computerised tracking system detects the presence of a person, the closest measuring tape starts to project upwards. When the tape reaches around 3m high it crashes and recoils back. Each hour, the system prints the total number of minutes spent by the sum of all visitors.”
202 Maps. 35,801 Locations. June 2010 to April 2011.
The data in this book was retrieved from the consolidated.db file of James Bridle’s iPhone. This information was recorded anonymously without the user’s knowledge, and represents the device’s own record of its location.
Trash | Track is an investigation into understanding the ‘removal-chain’ in urban areas. TrashTrack uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags, which are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualisations.
Cities can be considered “flows of information, vehicles and people” (Sheller, 2007) transported along diverse urban networks. In this Flowprint of London by URBAGRAM, the city’s extensive bus network is used to sketch an animated portrait of the living city.
Network & Society, a project by a team at MIT’s SENSEABLE City Lab uses data from 12 billion landline calls to highlight areas of the UK with strong social cohesion.
Regional boundaries are useful for governments, said Carlo Ratti, who led the work. “But they don’t say anything about how people in those regions interact.”
Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation.
In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.
