Hot Data 2024

Hot Data is a design research project by anthropologist April Barrett developed during her residency as part of the Design Researchers in Residence programme at the Design Museum, which explored the theme of Solar and climate crisis interventions. April invited Cally Gatehouse and me to help materialise the findings of the project for public display. Among a set of speculative objects, we created a digital heating device called the Data Do-Nothing Machine (after Eames) to interactively demonstrate the work and the heat generated by online activity and data centres.

The Data Do-Nothing Machine comprises a cluster of three Raspberry Pi computers inside a clear acrylic tube, above which foil ribbons are suspended and moved by the heat generated by computation. The museum visitor creates work on the Raspberry Pis by scrolling on an iPad. With sustained scrolling the temperature of the system rises as more work is done; the warm air then animates the ribbons and the light they reflect dances across the room. This creates tangible evidence of computational work.

The Raspberry Pis run an Express.js server which triggers the yes command when the p5.js interface is scrolled. The GitHub repository is available here.

Read April's account of the project.