This may be some of the coolest museum exhibit design that we have seen in a long time. The new ‘Urban Observatory’ Exhibit, which also provides an online experience on their website at UrbanObservatory.org, lets you compare data from different cities in order to better understand the way that we live on our planet today. There are all kinds of cool data that leverages GIS to display the information on maps in order to make it visual and easily understandable.
The exhibition design will hopefully take away some of the preconceptions of museums as boring places where sad people go to look at old, dead history. This museum exhibit is alive and it is about what is happening and how we live today. In fact, much of the data, such as current temperatures, traffic conditions, air quality measurements and more is actually live fed. The rest of the data including, poverty, population density, age demographics, public transport networks etc. is from the most recently available census and survey data from cities around the world.
The exhibit was featured in all of its glory, including huge monitors, interactive displays and the real-time data that makes it’s exhibition design so impressive at the Esri International User Conference in San Diego, CA from July 8–12. If you weren’t able to attend, you can visit the website at UrbanObservatory.org as most of the data and the side-by-side maps that carry it is available on the website.
Using the website, or at the exhibit, you can easily compare traffic between New York and Tokyo, or see which city has more park space. Perhaps you are curious where the most poverty is concentrated in a particular city, and whether other cities have dealt with it in a better way. All of this comparative data is available in an easy-to-understand and visual way from the Urban Observatory website.
The idea is to use this impressive museum exhibit design, the interactive real-time data experience and the easy-to-use website in order to allow citizens to easily access knowledge about the city they live in and compare it with other urban areas. This allows us to use comparative analysis to learn what a better way of organizing our cities might be. To see more head to the website UrbanObservatory.org