The idea of our model was to create a large fabric display of the city, that responds to data and changes it’s shape appropriately. We were inspired by Daniel Leithinger’s Interactive Shape Display’s, but wanted to simplify the mechanism for changing the shape. Therefore, we decided to use fans for this. The rivers in turn would be represented by strips of light.

Our design would look something like this:

As we were already moving the display with fans, we choose to draw our data from an API that follows wind speed in Pittsburgh. The fan powering the display would change its power based on the actual wind speed. The shapes loosely represent the topography of Pittsburgh, with the largest bulge being Mt. Washington

Here are images of our model, looking in on the airport:

And looking above, as a traveler would:

Here are videos of our finished model in action: