Climate Vis Jewellery

Who?

Alastair D’Silva (@EvilDeece) and Ruth Ellison (@RuthEllison) are a husband and wife team located in Canberra with a pet laser cutter and a fleet of domestic robots.

Alastair is a computer programmer by day and one of the founders for the Canberra hackerspace, Make Hack Void.

Ruth is a User Experience designer at Stamford Interactive. She’s very passionate about inclusive accessible user experiences and robots. In her free time, she’s busy using lasers to make geeky jewellery.

What?

How do we raise awareness of the awesomeness of science? What does temperature in your local area actually feel like? Can we make it wearable? What does Data Driven Jewellery look like?

Our Govhack submission is the intersection of science and art – a physical, wearable visualisation of the ACORN-SAT data provided by the Bureau of Meteorology.

How?

• Perl script scrapes ACORN-SAT data and renders an SVG of the jewellery. Inner and outer radii are configurable, and the engraving layer can be disabled (so we can generate earrings)
• Inkscape & Gcodetools used to convert the SVG into GCode (which our laser engraver speaks)
• The generated GCode is loaded into LinuxCNC, which controls the laser engraver
• Lasercut acrylic is painted and mounted onto pins or chains

Why?

• Because, despite loving all things digital, we still love the tangibility of being able to see and feel temperature changes through physical representations.
• We want to help raise awareness of science. By making physical visualisations of the temperature, we want to get people interested in the impact and usefulness of science in our lives, particularly in the global context of climate change.
• And finally, well, because science and lasers are cool! (hot?)

I want to make one!

You can download the generator from the thing on Thingiverse.

 Sneak peak

Here’s a sneak peak of our first prototype.

Alastair refining the data visualisation for the nth time!

Our presentation

Here’s our presentation to the judges & the crowd, on Sunday 3rd June 2012: Climate Vis Jewellery GovHack Presentation

Next steps

The plan for the future:

• Refine, refine, refine….
• Find longer term datasets to show climate change trends
• Upload your own datasets & create your own personalised jewellery!