Command and Control

“Command and Control” was a Totally Legit installation at Seattle City of The Future, in Capitol Hill Seattle in 2023, including David Hull, James Robinson, Shelly Farnham (myself), Andrew Cole, Jeff Brice, and Brandon Traynoff. This project provided a tangible, interactive manifestation of natural and man-made ecologies in Seattle and the Northwest, setting the stage for the notion in a future Seattle, we as citizens may leverage new technologies to control our own collective outcomes.

From this command and control room participants were encouraged to modify and interact with projected futures of the city, to see an impact on the well-being of urban communities based on publicly available data. Similarly, we visualized mitochondrial transformations in the greater Puget Sound area, revealing the hidden annual cycles of these natural communities outside of the built environment. An augmented reality visualization provided a systems view of the city’s data.

My primary role for this installation was to create the digital City of Seattle visualization projected onto the topographical map to represent community well-being by neighborhood, and have the map be controllable from dials that represented variables such as traffic, park area, density of community hubs (restaurants, coffee shops, and bars), and housing affordability. These dials controlled real-world data projected into the future using logistic regression, based on my prior work as a researcher. The goal was to show how these factors impact real-world well-being in a tangible, visible way. I also helped build the entry portal with Branon Traynoff.

EventSeattle City of the FutureLocationCapitol Hill, SeattleYear2023Created byTotally LegitLearn moretotallylegitllc.com