LO: Computational Fabrication

I found Nadeem Haidary’s work In-Formed especially powerful because it introduces potentially foreign and far-away-seeming data through such a ubiquitous, intimate human ritual such as eating. By visualizing the data in the prongs of a fork, the designer makes the statistic real, tangible, unable to ignore. On his website, he actually asks the question, “what if this information crawled off the page and seeped into the products that surround us?” (Haidary). As one looks at, reflects on, and imagines what it might look like to eat with this fork, it makes the reality of different eating habits and access far more tangible to the viewer than a simple fact they might read or hear. Regarding the algorithm, I assume the craft involved researching the statistics of calorie consumption by country, and then using those number to determine the proportions between each prong for each country it represented. The creator’s artistic sensibilities are manifested in the form in that it shows his ability to communicate something in a very human, tangible, and accessible way, as good designers do.