Connected - The wireless router - The 3D model and more

Connected by Deqing Sun & Oya Kosebay Connected is a sculpted representation communicating the data of the ratio of the population versus the internet users among the 12 most populated countries in the world. It is designed to communicate by its form, which is inspired by the quintessential icon of wireless internet port of Apple’s Airport. Connected is a 3D version of this icon creating groves on a spherical surface, each grove becoming a country.  The data is presented by using 2 different materials, “white” representing the non internet users, “black” representing the internet users and the combined height representing the population of the country.  The data is actually pulled from two different years, 2009 & 2011, making the difference of internet users between these 2 years incredibly visible. The project is trying to change how the wireless routers looks right now which is nothing more than a box housing the electronics. Adding with the data the wireless router is recognizable with it’s shape to communicate successfully the Free Wi-Fi service that it provides if attached to ethernet network. We are seeing this project to change the design of the wireless routers to make an object not to be hidden anymore. Connected by Deqing Sun & Oya Kosebay Connected is 3D printed and ready to be presented at this point. We changed our approach and our model a lot. Now it looks like this.

The shape is inspired by the Apple computer's Airport Icon.    Each grove represent a country. We are presenting on this first model only 12 countries, in order from the most populated.

The model uses two different materials to present the internet user ratios within each countries. Two different levels in each grove also represents how much of difference happened in the number of internet users in the same country in the course of 2 years - from 2009 to 2011. The first data that we were using was 2009 data and I found a more recent version of it. When we generated the curve to represent the new data we realized that there was a lot of difference in the visual so we decided to share that information as well. The cost for world wide web decreased greatly in the pass 2 years and it effected a lot of the most populated countries where the technology became more affordable.

Here is the pictures of the final 3D printed product