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

Connected Update - Where we are now?

The Sculpting data Into Everyday Object project is wrapping up. We have presented our first test and models couple of weeks ago and now it's the last stretch to finish the 3d printing. The shape of the object is slightly changed but before talking about it here is the initial models of our wireless router that communicates the ratio of internet users versus the population of the countries.

Here are the pages of our presentation

Sculpting Data into Everyday Objects - Project Proposal

After scrapping everything that we worked on with different team mates we are proposing a router casing that would reflect the fraction of internet users over the population in different countries of the world.

The idea generated by the interesting data of world population versus internet users in each country. When you lay down the top 10 most populated country and the number of people that uses internet among them, there comes out an interesting picture. The internet user number in a country like India is much more higher than United Kingdom as a "number" but if you take the "percentage" calculation of the users on population, United Kingdom has the highest number of 84% but India comes in only to 5%. This data was attractive to us because it can signify something about the culture, the technology investment and maybe the wealth of the countries.

Taking it from there and going to the object we talked about objects that are needed or used to have access to the internet. I had an idea of using a computer mouse but Deqing came up with the router idea. It is needed and used for wireless connection and every one has one and it just sits there. You have to have it, you don't have to hold it or move it daily maybe never, it does it's duty, quietly as a part of the household. Some of us like to hide it behind furniture, some of us put it up high but it is almost always a eyesore with blinking lights. How about making the router an object of sculpture, an object of beauty more than it's regular shape. On that note we want to represent the internet user data as casing over the original casing. The population and the internet users number will reflect in the shape of the countries and taking it in 3D how high that country will be placed. In fact what will happen is higher population countries will peak higher than the other ones. To reinforce this idea here is the processing sketch.

The visual can be created with colors too. Here are some sketches how the object may look like at the end.

To take it further another way to go with this idea of inputting data on a surface, we can sculpt it in a way that it looks like this data is inhabiting the router. It can go around the router like a fungi attacking the router mimicking human populating the world. We can map how we will create the path of the growing fungi using another aspect of the data too. Here is a sketch to represent this.

We are very excited to further investigate this idea and come up with different shapes to represent the data over a wireless router.