Creating the ESB Display
CLIP wanted people to visualize carbon emissions for Climate Week. The goal: design an interactive art piece that did not feel like a science project.
The initial idea was to have a diorama of a section of New York City. This evolved to a single building — the iconic Empire State Building — the Empire State Building 3D printed and enclosed inside a vitrine. The vitrine would fill up with smog as the light slowly dimmed to a glowing orange.
I cross referenced a few sources to determine the approximate emissions of the cars in NYC and mocked up a display that felt about the right size to make a visual impact. The building was scaled to fit within the volume of the frame (1:415) but also in relation to the volume of CO2e emitted by NYC cars in one day.
The Components
The maple wood frame is reclaimed from a discarded pallet that was carefully deconstructed, cut down, and thickness planed, routed, and assembled.
The side panels are acrylic with a Polymer-Dispersed Liquid Crystals (PDLC) film applied. The film is opaque when unpowered and becomes transparent as an AC voltage is applied. The power supply for the film lives inside the base of the Empire State Building.
At the top of the display, hidden behind a translucent diffuser panel are two LED circuits: one orange and one white light. The power supply for the LEDs also lives at the base of the ESB. A 0–10V led dimmer allows the white lights to be slowly dimmed with a rotary potentiometer.
The Empire State Building was 3D printed in sections and epoxied together (though Lego style joints were definitely in the original plan).
We wanted users to interact with the display, to put the level of smog in their control. The signal wires for the PDLC film and LED dimmer are routed to a plaque with a slider knob that simultaneously moves a rotary encoder (for PDLC film) and a rotary potentiometer (for the LED dimming).
The Future of the Exhibit
The display lives at Newlab in Brooklyn, the headquarters of CLIP. I am currently working to convert the user interaction to be digitally controlled, cycling from a smog-free vitrine to a smoggy and orange glowing display throughout the day.
