Live Singapore: Formula One City

Large scale events disrupt a cities' daily routines. What better opportunity to explore this effect than Singapore's Formula One Grand Prix? How does this event impact daily life? How do citizens respond to it? How does the populous share their excitement via cellphone?

My role on this project was designing and developing the visualization in coordination with Oliver Senn, who was processing SMS data from SingTel CDR records and scaffolded the core functionality of the application. We aggregated the SMS activity into 15 minute intervals based on cell towers, and represented each as a soft edged circle. The low activity cell towers are small, blue, low opacity circles, andas their activity increases they become larger and more opaque, and shift from green to yellow to orange to red. The major events of the formula one race are played out alongside the visualization to illustrate how the crowds viewing the race react to the events through their SMS messaging.

The project is part of an exhibition featured at the Singapore Art Museum from April 7th to May 1st, 2011. The project was developed by the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory in conjunction with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology.