Visualizations have the potential to be incredibly powerful, helping us to understand issues and see potentially hidden connections between things. Bruce Sterling wrote as part of his Viridian Design Principles, that one should try to “make the invisible visible.”
Amateur Human is a group and/or single individual artist/designer who is making a variety of accessories to help to visualize and understand our energy consumption and effects thereof. The project pictured above is called Puff, and attempts to give the driver feedback on the amount of pollution coming from their tailpipe. Other projects include a fuel tracker and energy bank. Apparently these projects may also be made available as instructions to re-create them.
The person behind this is Karolina Sobecka, and I came across her site through another link to this other project she did, called Wildlife. From her website: “At night projections from moving cars are shone on the buildings downtown. Each car projects a video of a wild animal. The animal’s movements are programmed to correspond to the speed of the car: as the car moves, the animal runs along it speeding up and slowing down with the car, as the car stops, the animal stops also.”
Watch the video.