I recently had the pleasure of working with Parsons MFA Design and Technology professors, Colleen Macklin and John Sharp, on their Data Toys research initiative. I was tasked with creating a modular toy which would load different sets of data on an iPad depending on which head was attached to the main body
I documented my build process on the following Flickr set...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/52082118@N05/sets/72157632976117691/detail/
From PETLab Website
Employable? is an early prototype for the "Making it in America" project based on the project API. The toy models the relationships between 25 cities in the US and the potential an immigrant has for finding employment in order to reflect on how likely immigrants of different education levels are to find employment.
A set of toy characters represent immigrants with three different education levels—no high school diploma, up to an associate’s degree, and a bachelor’s degree or better. By placing a toy on the iPad, the player selects a city, then one of the three years for which we have data. The player can then see the employment pool within which the immigrant would compete. The competition conveys the percentage of potential applicant pool broken down by level of employment and employment status.
More information on this project...
petlab.parsons.edu/datatoys/projects/employable/