Hi there, I’m Alex Sciuto. “Sciuto” is pronounced just like Proscuitto if you are a fan of cured meats. Before coming back to CMU to do a masters program, I was a self-taught designer, data visualizer, and computer programmer, and I still feel a lot of impostor syndrome about that. I really like the challenge of taking raw data and turning it into story worth telling or an experience worth interacting with. I have a lot of experience doing browser-based development, and I’d love this semester to learn about other development environments.

I’m pretty active on Twitter. I follow a lot of visual journalists and dataviz people. @SciutoAlex. I occasionally use GitHub. github.com/sciutoalex.

Space Activity Tracking Project

You can read the full write-up of the project on my website.

I was curious how people use the studio where my program is located in. As part of the class, Gadgets, Sensors, and Human Activity, I created a series of Arduino IR sensors that recorded when there was movement in different parts of the studio space, these sensors then communicated back to a base station that visualized the data.

The project was successful because I had never created anything with Arduino before, and running the system for a day, people were intrigued by the project. It got people talking. It was lacking in its robustness. The sensors’ batteries died quickly, and there was no permanent storage. The visualization was kind of tacked on at the end and wasn’t part of the official assignment.

Above is a shot of the sensors, I created three of them.

The system in action. Actually a photo-shopped image of the system in action. Very bad lighting that day.