Chronorhythms

“New Inflatable Moment” exhibition at the Boston Society of Architects asked Certain Measures to develop an engaging installation for visitors to learn about historical inflatable architecture. The team came up with an immersive 12-foot interactive timeline controlled by a simple dial that allows visitors to “tune” history by browsing the critical events in the development of inflatables situated in the context of the pulse of cultural fascinations. In order to differentiate from just a normal timeline, we also incorporated a visualization using Google Ngram.

Ngram is a online language dataset/search engine that compiles billions of words from millions of written volumes across the last four centuries. Key terms were chosen and represented by a stream graph in order to understand frequency, recurrence, and cultural presence of various concepts across time. By plotting the key events related to inflatable architecture over this stream graph, patterns emerge over time between the key events and articles published during the time of the event.