NOTES

Creative ways to visualise/sonify air quality data

We've been looking for inspiration on creative ways to publicly display/sonify air pollution data, and have put together this short post to showcase some inventive ways that other people/organisations have chosen to visualise/sonify data.

Notes on sensor components for a low-cost air quality monitoring device

Poor air quality is an increasing global concern and has significant health impacts. For researchers and citizen scientists to monitor air quality effectively, they need access to air pollution sensors that collect reliable data. Commercial air quality monitoring devices are often expensive, and so many citizen science projects have turned to DIY devices assembled from affordable components. At Then Try This, we are looking to develop our own low-cost, portable …

Designing and prototyping a virus robot installation during a pandemic

At the end of 2019 we were ready to begin work on our second iteration of the Viruscraft project, moving focus from how viruses jump from one species to another, to how they evolve once they are in a population. This project has been focused from the start on designing and building physical interfaces to help understand invisible biological interactions between viruses, host organisms and evolution. Our new plans included …

Evidence Support Initiative pilot report

The Evidence Support Initiative is a pilot project pairing science researchers with councils to facilitate evidence-based decision making, and learn about each other’s worlds, funded by Civic Square’s Dream Fund.

The Evidence Support Initiative launch

We’ve been awarded seed funding to pilot a new system to encourage and facilitate scientific researchers to work with their local councils, providing on-demand advice on scientific issues to fit the needs of councillors, and perhaps also passing on the skills to find and use scientific information.

Step by step: building tangible livecoded braid robots

After successfully performing maypole dances and creating simple twists and weaves with hundreds of passers by at the Algomech festival in Sheffield, we noticed how much people like to interact with our woven robots - wanting to help or direct their actions by picking them up and trying to understand what they are doing.

As we are interested in tangible programming - where we move code from its conventional …

Building a new Pattern Matrix with conductive thread

While processor speeds and the use of computation in our society have increased enormously, it is significant that the materials of electronics construction itself (discrete components soldered on to resin printed circuit boards) has been broadly consistent for well over fifty years.

The Penelope project is concerned with re-evaluating histories of textile technologies with mathematical and scientific thought. The emergence of “wearable electronics”, in particular inspiration from Penelope collaborators and …