Longlisted: Information is Beautiful Awards 2023
Forecast is a sentimental window that uses light and mist to experientially recreate past weather conditions for a future civilisation forced underground by climate change.
Inspired by the rising need to shelter in subterranean and air-conditioned architecture in tropical Singapore — where temperatures are rising at twice the global average — it imagines how a devastated society might cope with a bleak outlook by looking back at better times.
Category:
Product Design
Physical Computing
Experience Design
Data Visualisation
Design Art
Tools:
Arduino
Laser Cutting & Engraving
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe After Effects
Photography
6 panel buttons representing cities vulnerable to climate (London, Singapore, Lagos, Mumbai, San Diego, Kiribati) may be pressed to trigger a recreation of the weather in that city 100 years ago on June 13th, 1973.
LED strips behind the acrylic window play one of three animations: a sunny, cloudy, or stormy day. Ultrasonic mist atomisers hidden within the body of the structure also come alive, serving either to obscure the window with fog or to bathe the user in a humid shower from above.
LED Animations
Mister Set-Up Tests
Control Panel Design
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![Legend for control panel]()
The control panel is an atlas that simultaneously visualises past and future conditions on Earth.
Direct engraving on the wood represents shorelines from 1973 and is overlaid by pieces of transparent acrylic that trace both the predicted encroaching of the oceans and potential belt of life-threatening heat over the equator.
Names of major cities today that could one day be abandoned, ominously dot this same map.
Process
The installation runs on the Teensy 4.0 microcontroller which connects to LED strips, push buttons, and ultrasonic mister modules.
Link to the full Arduino code below:
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ForecastGraduate Exhibition (Central Saint Martins)
