So I was recently made aware that my idea has already been done! (kind of…)

This man made a Twitter powered Scalextric using Arduino and his own software called Conducttr.

Instead of being disheartened by this, I am instead relieved to see that it is a plausible idea that has been shown to work. My idea is slightly different as I intend to race two cars, each with different Twitter searches, so I am not too concerned.

All that matters is what it is used for at the end of the day. This is what I need to think about now. This video has provided me some inspiration, as he uses this creation to send a message about reckless driving.

I do like the idea of making the fact it’s Scalextric relevant to whatever discussion I want it to have.

given the time of the hand-in, and how close it will be by then, I like the idea of making this political, about the EU referendum. One car could be #EUin, the other #EUout. It could have a cheesy banner above the display saying something like

“what future should we be driving towards?”

Anyway, that’s just a thought, but my favourite idea so far.

After our workshop using littleBits, I initially thought of using that as the main component for this project. And whilst it’s true it would probably contain everything I needed for this project in terms of different modules, there is one main issue I can see with this.

Cost. littleBits are pretty expensive. As a student who’s main priority is alcoho- i mean food, I probably wouldn’t be able to justify spending the amount required to make several projects using littleBits. The starter kits alone cost upwards of £70, which probably wouldn’t even cover what I would need.

A very likely alternative to this would be to use Arduino-based electronics, which would bring the cost right down, especially if I use it cleverly in conjunction with things I already own (such as the Scalextric track).

 

The cost of some starter kits i’ve found online can be as low as £10. This is therefore a much more likely solution. Not to mention that it can achieve everything that littleBits can.

I have no experience working on Arduino projects, so it will be interesting for me to experiment and try and improve my knowledge on the subject.

Going into this project, I knew I wanted to do something relating to data visualisation. I was inspired by the works of Aaron Koblin, The Rumpus Room, and most things on Information is Beautiful.

My Digital Media Project in second year also explored the idea of gathering data and presenting it in a visual format with Planets of Change. So this area has always been something that has interested me.

I was inspired by the workshop we had using littleBits, and used this to inform my idea and develop the concept for the project.

 

The Concept: To take information that we primarily only see online, and present it in an offline, visual way.

Using Twitter as an example; Twitter gathers huge amounts of data every day from users through what they talk about and hashtag. It can get massive amounts of quantitative data and paint a picture on what the major issues of the day are. We see this data through the ‘trending’ section.

However, if we wanted to see other data, like comparing the amount of times two different hashtags have been tweeted, we generally have to go out of our way to see that. And when we do, I think the impact is lost, as the majority of people will just see the number on the screen, and won’t be able to fully understand the importance of what that number represents.

An Example Idea

 

One idea that I had as a solution to the above problem, would be to set up a Scalextric track, where one car moved every time a certain #hashtag was tweeted, and the other car moved when a different one was. This way you would be able to visualise which of the hashtags were being tweeted about more.

The decision would then be what would you use this tool to show?

It could be used as a political tool. One car being #Hillary the other being #Trump. Or it could be used to highlight how we as a society have a warped sense of priorities. One car being #SyrianRefugees, the other being #Bieber. Or it could simply be an entertainment piece. You could get people to tweet #RedCar and #BlueCar and have a Twitter powered race.

I like the idea that it can be all of the above. This is a tool at the end of the day, and can be used and customised however the user wants.

Output for the Module

So in terms of what I hope to produce at the end of this module; I would like to put on an exhibition using several examples of visualising online data in a physical way. The Scalextric track would just be one example, and I feel like I would probably need more than just that to explore the potential of this idea.

– Alex