“NASA’s Kepler mission is doing what we may one day call NASA’s most important project. It’s searching for habitable planets—second Earths—that our grandchildren’s grandchildren may call home, or that could contain life as we know it. So far, NASA’s spotted about 2,300 of these exoplanets, including 48 that appear to be in a sweet spot distance away from the sun. So what do they look like? Two gurus—data artist Jer Thorp and John Underkoffler, the designer who created the interfaces in Minority Report—have produced a UI that lets you find out, using the pinch and zoom brilliance of Underkoffler’s most famous work. The project began when Thorp discovered NASA’s first paper. “It was really fascinating, but I couldn’t make much sense of the charts and graphs that were in it, so I made the first visualization to answer some questions for myself: What do 1,300 planets look like? How do these planets compare to Earth and the other planets in our solar system?” Thorp tells Co.Design. “The answers, of course, were in the paper, but I didn’t have the expertise or familiarity with the visual language to find them.” Explore the Galaxy Using the Actual Minority Report Interface - Co.Design
“Windswept is an art installation at San Francisco’s Randall Museum that celebrates the intricacies of wind interacting with architecture. To create the effect, designer Charles Sowers deployed 612 freely-rotating anodized aluminum arrows on a 20’x35’ grid, each serving as a “discrete data point” of extremely local airflow to form “a kind of large sensor array.”” (via A Weathervane Wall Turns Wind Patterns Into Data Art | Co.Design: business innovation design)
