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Touching Air

For this week, I decided to look into the work of Stefanie Posavec, specifically her explorations with wearable data visualizations. Collaborating with information researcher Miriam Quick, Posavec created this piece titled Touching Air in 2014. The two collected data regarding large particulate (PM10) levels. Each necklace they created in this series was meant to visualize a week’s worth of data, with the size and shape of each piece representative of the amount of particulates in the air. The large, spiky piece in the image above represents the fact that there are a dangerous amount of particulates in the air–making the piece harmful to touch.

Posavec wrote that her decision to visualize this data using a necklace had to do with how these specific particulate levels are harmful to one’s heart and lungs. When I imagine data visualizations, my mind immediately thinks of graphs and other two-dimensional ways of visualizing data. Because of how this went against the norm of what I consider to be data visualizations, I felt that it was an interesting piece to dissect. I was inspired with how the communication of the data was representational of the issues that the subject brings about.