Data Through Design: A Tactile Take on Open Data | NY Media Center | Enigma

"Data Through Design, a newly installed art exhibit created in honor of NYC’s Open Data Week, offers data enthusiasts a rare treat: a tactile encounter with open data.

Municipal data, where available, comes mostly in neat, comma-separated rows. Sometimes, it is transformed into lines and circles, its stories served up on gridlines, garnished sparingly with the appropriate annotations. But even in the most inviting of circumstances, open data seldom asks its audience to reach out and touch. Data Through Design, open to visitors until the end of this week at the NY Media Center, does just that.

Hosted by Enigma, CARTO and the Pratt SAVI (with sponsorship support by Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation), the temporary exhibit showcases eight projects that pose a number of central questions about life and death in New York City.

Data Through Design is an endeavor to view New York City through the prism of open data. The projects take a range of approaches using the city’s datasets as a starting point, with the larger proportion seeking to represent the chosen datasets in a novel manner. A few challenge us to think critically about the endeavor of open data and the insights it brings....

For those interested in experiencing the exhibit firsthand, Data Through Design is open this week, Monday through Friday between 9am and 7pm and on Saturday between 10am and 6pm at the NY Media Center in DUMBO, Brooklyn. "