Mitchell Whitelaw over at The Teeming Void has a great post about his 3D-printed weather data bracelet. The bracelet is beautiful (if a little prickly), but it gets its meaning from the data embedded in it. The peaks are the temperature highs and the troughs are the lows from a year’s worth of data in his city of Canberra; the holes show weeks of rainfall.
I love what he has to say about it, too:
“The bracelet makes weather data tangible, but also invites an intimate, tactile familiarity. People interpret the form with their fingers, recalling as they do the wet Spring, or that cold snap after the extreme heat of February; it mediates between memory and experience, and between public and private – weather data becomes a sort of shared platform on which the personal is overlayed. The form also shows how the generalising infrastructures of computing and fabrication can be brought back to a highly specific, localised point. This for me is the most exciting aspect of digital fabrication and “mass customisation” – not more choice or user-driven design (which are all fine, but essentially more of the same, in terms of the consumer economy) – but the potential for objects that are intensely and specifically local.”
Make sure to check out the full post for some delightfully geeky details about how it was made! (Thanks, Kiwi Back in Sydney!)
ADVERTISEMENT
