Lasers, Food & Data (Telling a Story About Food Security)

Can a vegetable tell a story about food access in Somerville?  Yep.

In public settings, it can be quite hard to get folks walking by interested in a data-driven argument about your cause.  We often argue that a creative data sculpture can grab their attention… like maybe a vegetable laser cut with some data about food security!

We’ve worked with the Somerville Food Security Coalition a few times, including for our first data mural pilot project!  Recently, we had a chance to come together again around their local data about food security at the Somerville Arts Council’s 2014 Ignite Festival.  The festival celebrates fire and food, which inspired us to laser cut some data onto food and see how people reacted!

Here’s all the veggies we cut – eggplant, cucumber, zucchini, bread, and watermelon:

In addition, we prompted folks to interact with two questions – both of which they could answer with M&Ms and raisins.  Asking folks to take an M&M survey is a highly effective way to get them to interact with their data!

https://twitter.com/rahulbot/status/498880294226001920

https://twitter.com/rahulbot/status/498883181714882560

Here’s a behind-the-scenes video showing the laser cutter in action:

This is cross-posted to the Civic Media blog.