Putting news to good use
It’s really amazing how many ways people find to visualize and use news. Here are a few of my favorites. (Click the pictures for more information.)
NewsBreaker
NewsBreaker is MSNBC’s version of the classic Breakout game that fetches articles from RSS feeds based on which block you hit. There is also a screen saver.
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eRiceCooker
eRiceCooker tracks Internet news about genetically modified rice. Whenever there is a new report about GM rice, a quarter cup of rice is dispensed into the cooker. When the cooker has enough rice for a meal, water is added automatically to the rice and the cooker is switched on. When the rice is done, an email is sent out to inviting people to eat the rice.
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Monument (If it Bleeds, it Leads)
In this piece a computer program continuously scans the headlines of 4,500 English-language news sources around the world, looking for people who have been reported killed. Each time it finds an article, an algorithm determines the number of deaths, and instructs a ceiling-mounted mechanism built from Legos to drop one yellow BB per person.
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The Vestigii Ticker Chair
The Vestigii Ticker chair is an interactive resting place for the Vestigiii fashion studio in Berlin. It is not just being placed in the centre of the designer’s activity, but also inhabits an ephemeral, invisible information space that continuously streams information, news and data through the airwaves and copper cables of our modern cities.
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Vibrating Shoes
Shoes that vibrate based on the stock market.
You can now receive computer data through your shoes, rather than via the computer screen
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News Knitter
News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater.
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Java Toaster
It’s the engineering equivalent of a haiku: Robin Southgate’s Java toaster, a device he assembled as part of his final year design project at Brunel University in England. The toaster dials a free phone number to get the weather forecast and burns the appropriate symbol on a piece of toast. And … that’s it.
