Traffic State
Traffic State is a physical visualisation of traffic in New York City,
based on live data provided by the city’s transport authority. It is a
response to a brief called 21st Century Barometers — physical devices
which live in a domestic environment and provide useful daily data from
the internet. The metal links hung below provide a mechanical graph of
the average traffic speed for the past few hours.
Working with a team of one other interaction designer and a product designer, we prototyped a number of different versions, from cardboard and string to the final version with laser-cut plywood. I developed a simple Processing program to parse the data and send the average speed to an Arduino inside the device, which updates regularly and powers the servos.
