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Lovely web documentation. You did a lot of work on the physical end of things… but did you do the right work? The black dye strikes me as an unnecessary and confounding complication. It might also have helped to do (or present) some research about icicle formation…

Beautiful idea, painful, painful execution. 🙂 Can you use a material besides water with a higher freezing temperature that still freezes clear? There *must* be a better solution than waiting for the temperature to drop. Or did you think that’d hurt the authenticity of it? Oh, and we should chat about that car detection hardware/algorithm. 🙂 -SB

Is there a way to keep the water in the containers from freezing? Might be interesting to try to set this up inside of a freezer, with the tanks positioned outside of the freezer.

Yeah, along with the first comment I’m wondering if there’s another material that will yield a similar effect but be perhaps more permanent than an icicle as well. Especially when I envision this in some kind of exhibit that’s like art and environmental awareness — I think seeing pollution visualized this way would definitely have an impact on people, but you’d have to have something that can stand up to being displayed. The use of icicles from water also seems a bit counterintuitive for me because icicles melt but air pollution changes our environment forever — so I think your message would be stronger if your artifacts didn’t just melt.

Hehe, it’s like a mad scientist project–Beautiful idea though. I agree with the other comments though: I wonder if you could’ve displayed the data you collected maybe with *digital* icicles (although I also agree that there is something enchanting in the idea of creating your own icles). I’m still not exactly sure what data your trying to portray here–how does the freqency of passing cars show information of pollution? Maybe you could have collected data on polution and then used that. Keep making icicles though! Really cool! -Amanda

I LOVE this idea of making a physical visualiztion of the “pollution” in your street. really wish it had worked

Wouldn’t most of the icicles be similar ‘dirtiness’?

Can’t you gather the data first and then make the ice in a more controlled environment (with constant temperature)?

Something Karl told us about in our small group was that using the car traffic as a data source was intended to have an interesting side effect of a sort of chronological record of the pollution/unique data source. (like bands of pollution along the icicle as it freezes over time) — nvm, he talked about this at the end

Really, really interesting idea…I hope you give it another shot! Maybe you could keep the tanks inside your house, and feed the tubes out the window.