180 x 120: Designing Alternate Location Systems

Using 180 RFID tags to track and plot locations over time, guests to an event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) collectively constructed a public visualization of the individual and group activities by building a history of movement throughout the space over 120 minutes. The projected histogram builds over time, revealing crowd intelligence, patterns of group distribution, zones of intensity, and preferred locations. The real-time data is projected atop a geometrically constructed, three-dimensional tessellated screen whose texture and shape have been previously calculated using a model of expected user clustering and activity. The juxtaposition of real and expected data manifest itself in this group created visual artifact. This paper presents a structured design approach to location systems that ignores quality and reliability, celebrates the loss of privacy, integrates physical architecture into the output, and explores crowd generation of public digest artifacts. A resulting deployed system is described.