To the Coffee Cart- Balloons that Rise at the Art Center Night

How do data mining and behaviroal capturing technologies tell the stories of human being? How can we tease out the unconsciousness and implicitness of behaviors from a collection of seemingly monotonous data sets? Is there a way to acquire active feedback from the subject by engaging them in a series of participatory events?

Based on the same methodology of a previous project, Cube Community Data Journal, this project embraced a more speculative strategy of portraying human activity through data with tactics that intrigue active feedback observed by the participants.

Differed from the sensor network designed for Cube Community project, which logs and visualize data after it being collected, this network allows the visualization of the data to be instantly output into the space. Pressure sensors were installed on the thermal pots of the coffee cart, which serves the Art Center Night students everyday from Monday to Thursday, to mesure the amount of drinks consumed in and to control the balloons that rise in the Wind Tunnel Gallery, an open space being overlooked from the coffee cart.

Part 1: Collecting Data

The balloons were controlled by motors attached to their ends, that wind them up every time a cup of drink is being sold. The balloons are color coated as such that the yellow respond to the sale of coffee, green to tea, and the blue, registers every time Jim, the cartman drinks a gulp of water from his own cup. By taking time lapse photos of the balloons every 30 seconds for 3 hours, a sequence of the data is collected on a daily base allowing for further reference and analysis.

Remote control experiemtns:

The dynamics of the balloons became a topic around coffee cart and sparked a conversation between the cartman and the attendants of Art Center Night. It was found that the curiosity of the relationship between sales of drinks and the height of the balloons became led to change of perception, indicated by more active observation into the space. Once people became familiarized with the behavior of the system, they start to use it as a way of information input and talked about the ranking between different drinks and their daily activity.

Part 2: Data Story Info-graphics

The outcome of the experiment implies the potentiality of a participatory way of data mining through technologies. Output the data into the physical space through evocative visual forms may turn the passive participation into the active. The project also points to a new direction of studying people's activity that uses one participant as an intermediary between designer and the larger subject, who is responsible for the outcome and who observes various reaction people have in a specific condition. In this case, the cartman becomes a secondary narrator of the data story, who 'controlled' the balloons using his daily gesture and who observed and informed the activities going on in Art Center Night.

3600 snapshots from the timelapse movies captured for 9 days were spread out and studied closely for recurring patterns.

The poster as a visual presentation of the project allows the viewer to get a gradually deeper view to the data with each fold.