Fountains of data
If you're sitting in a typical office, using e-mail, instant messaging and corporate online databases but somehow are also using stacks and stacks of actual paper, you probably feel as if you're already drowning in data.
Nevertheless, a group of industrial design technofetishists not only want you to swim in information; it wants to hold your head under the surface. With something called Datafountain, this dark cabal wants to embed information in the last part of urban design that lets you get a moment's peace.
Picture three jets of water, whose height varies based on the current exchange rates of the euro, the yen and the U.S. dollar, updating every five seconds. Or just go to the Web site--which already has an animated picture.
"The relation between money and water is evident," the site's creators say. But what a 4-foot column of yen water is going to tell me about budgeting for bootleg anime imports is less crystal-clear.
"Is information technology putting us constantly under pressure, or could it also have a calming effect?" the site wonders. Well, when you look at a fountain, would you rather think, "Ooh, pretty" (or just stare slack-jawed) or "Uh oh--maybe my Virgin Airlines stock is tanking"?
And it's not even a new concept--PARC, the legendary Xerox research lab, had a fountain several years ago, in which the water surged and ebbed with the company's stock price. And then there was the glorified paperweight that
This is why the Information Age is better than the Industrial Age. Where they had open sewers lining the streets, we get excessive data clutter, which fosters only a spiritual malaise. Beats cholera.
Watch this space--we're expecting news of bonsai trees cultivated to reveal global employment trends any day now.
(Link via Neil Gaiman.)
