Shannon Ha – Looking Outwards – 09

For this weeks post, I will be looking at Jina Lee’s Week 07 Looking Outwards post on data visualization. The emote project for the London 2012 Olympics assessed the global audiences’s real time emotional response to the different events throughout out the games and visualized it physically through a generative physical sculpture. I agree with Jina’s point about how innovative and well executed this project was as it was able to synthesize everyone’s opinions within a small amount of space. This allows people to unify and gain new perspectives on a general response to this global event. One thing that Jina did not touch upon was how this information can help improve future games as the Olympic Committee can use this data to improve parts of the event that weren’t well received by the general public. I think that’s a very effective way to utilize this data beyond an observation tool for visitors of the exhibition

As a designer I also admire the simplicity of the control’s design. The singular nob/button really invites the user to interact with it as there isn’t much complication beyond that one button. This is important as the intent behind this project is to make this information to be as accessible and inclusive to all people as possible.