This week I went to the New York Hall Of Science for a self-guided field trip. It has free hours on Fridays and Sundays and you don't have to pay extra fro admissions. The task was to look at two exhibitions, “Connected Worlds” and “Mathematica.”
The first exhibit I went to is the "Connected Worlds." It is located on the third level of the museum and it is an interactive installation. There is a screen locating at the entrance of the hall explaining the whole project. There is a curved screen locating at the center of the space and it represents five different environment like jungle, river, pond. The project is about telling people the importance of water by letting people to interact with the environment
At the center of the installation, there is one environment called "waterfall," and it is where water comes from. As we can see from this screen, water coming from the waterfall is going to the environment located at lower right corner. And it is determined by the placement of the "logs" which viewers can change.
Once water has arrived this location, the viewers can lift their hands and see the seeds floating. Once the seed changes to the one the viewers want, they can put their hands down and plant the seeds. Then the viewers can see the plant growing.
There is also another interesting interaction in the exhibit which is the book. The viewers can tap on the book or flip the pages of the book to interact with it. Each page has some information about water as well.
The other exhibit is called Mathematica. It is consisted by a lot of small installations that talks about interesting facts of math.
The first thing I see is the history wall which has brief introduction of events and celebrities including mathematician and more. It starts from 1200 to 2000.
This installation talks about the use of perspective. From one end of the installation where the viewers can peak through a small hole, the shapes can form a complete drawing. However, from the side, we can see that they are just different smaller pieces. People needs to carefully measure the angle to be able to create this phenomenon.
This is an installation talks about minimal edges. When putting those different shapes of wires into a bubbled solution, the solution will create interesting shapes when coming out. For example the cube shape can create a smaller cube in the middle. However, the shape nexts to it, because of missing two lines, is creating one curved shape in the center.
This installation is mimicking the movement of the universe. When pushing the button, a ball will be released and there are four balls total. When a ball is released, it will move towards the hold in the middle in a spiral way. The four balls are not going to bump into each other just like Earth is not going to bump into other planets.
Books
After going through the book list, I decided to read the following ones: Design for Information and Art and Science.
I did my undergraduate as an interior design student which means I studied art for four years. And now I am in IDM which is in Tandon, school of engineer. I can say that I studied both art and science. The first book, Art and Science by Eliane Strosberg, talks about the relationship between art and science. Science, in people's mind, can be purely logical, and art, on the other hand, is based on emotional. However, there is a deep connection between those two topics. For example, the gold ratio, a mathematical concept, has been applied to a lot paintings, architecture.
As a designer who has about zero experience with data visualization, I am still interested in different ways of presenting data. And this book gives different examples of data visualization, from a subway map to the navigation sign of the airport. There are much more ways of presenting data than just the histogram. It is important to know which way is the best to deliver the message.