Inspiration
Today, I start my warmup project for Studio: Fabrication. For my final project, I hope to make an Internet-connected lamp that will light up based on some data stream. Currently, I am looking at the larger data streams such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. However, as the lamp is likely not going to be an installation piece, I am leaning toward more localized data, such as weather, tides, or personal Twitter/Facebook feeds.
My first idea for this was a small lamp/oversized paperweight that would mimic local tides with a miniature wave pool. Similarly, I was thinking to simulate the weather with an automated snowglobe that would start snowing when snow was forecasted for the next, say, five days. Unfortunately, both of these require an airtight container for continued functioning.
As for larger data feeds, I was thinking about doing a twitter happiness indicator. Maybe a globe that shows where people are using the happy emojis in real time. This would be similar to Jell-O’s happiness billboard they did a while back. Other similar globe based ideas would present a challenge as I can only feasible have so many lights on the globe due to monetary constraints. Similar, I could have a light up book that shows updates to Wikipedia.
Alternatively, I could focus more on the representation of the incoming data in a unique and artist way as opposed to finding an interesting data stream.
In the end, there are certain constraints I need to hold to: the project can’t be too large, the data stream needs to change multiple times a day, the data stream can only have a few dimensions, the final form of the lamp needs to be related to the data stream displayed