ON BRINK

Creator

Stupp, Dustin

Title

ON BRINK

Subject

Interaction Design -- Exhibitions

Graduate students

Date Created

2019-06-24

Relation

PolyU Design - Projects gallery

Format

Photographs

Identifier

ASSD2019MDIDD01P001

ASSD2019MDIDD01P002

ASSD2019MDIDD01P003

Is Part Of

MDes (Interaction Design)

Description

ON BRINK

Our cultural interaction dematerializes more and more into digital data. Distributed-ledger-technologies, such as the blockchain, enable consensus-dependent applications like cryptocurrencies or smart contracts in digital environments, with Bitcoin being the first and most popular example.

ON BRINK is a physical data visualisation of the Bitcoin blockchain: Adapting the mining metaphor, it encodes data on blocks appended to the chain in real-time. It produces piles of soil that relate in size to the number of transactions within a block, and displays six of them at a time on a continuous conveyor system, thus reflecting the human attention span given to a transaction on the blockchain: A transaction counts as confirmed after five blocks have been appended to its containing block. A display informs about the latest block appended to the chain. As the passed blocks accumulate to a growing pile at the end of the conveyor system, the initial pile of soil keeps decreasing: our digital tools are strongly dependent on physical resources. ON BRINK relates our digital to our physical environment by physicalizing the human-related data points of time, location and participation of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Collection

PolyU Design Annual Show 2019: beyond the surface = 二〇一九理大設計年展: 表裡以外