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Photo by Eric Gunther © SOSO

In his 1960 book Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, the critic and historian Reyner Banham presciently noted a growing chasm between technological change and the capacity of designers to express it. “It may well be,” he wrote, “that what we have hitherto understood as architecture, and what we are beginning to understand of technology, are incompatible disciplines.” But if the novel technologies to which Banham then pointed operated at the scale of the building, today the chasm looks even wider: what might it mean for design to reflect and represent the vast flows of data that now occur everywhere from smartwatches to vehicles to server farms?

This was the conundrum faced by the experiential design firm SOSO at the University of Virginia’s new School of Data Science building, where the firm was commissioned to create a large-scale permanent installation with the aim of making the school’s often-intangible work visible and accessible. The result is Data Structure, a 45-foot-tall chain of crystalline, illuminated lanterns that hangs in the multistory atrium at the heart of the Hopkins Architects-designed building. The lanterns take the form of skeletal boxes, each face of which consists of a 7-segment display—the instantly recognizable interface of early digital computing that lives on in the faces of alarm clocks everywhere. Below the sculpture, just feet from the building’s main entrance, is a large touchscreen where anyone passing through the space can stop and select datasets—which can be submitted by any student or faculty member at the university—for the sculpture to display. Multicolored streams of digits then begin to rise rhythmically through the atrium, translating data into vivid compositions of light and motion.

Photo by Yaxuan Liu © SOSO

The design for the piece came out of a glossary of data science terminology in which the phrase “data structure” appeared, says Yaxuan Liu, creative lead at SOSO. With its physical connotations, the phrase suggested a link between the digital and the physical that the designers sought to build upon. Rather than using data as inspiration for design, they looked for a way of rendering datasets visible without imposing an external framework onto them. Data Structure’s moving columns of digits allowed them to do exactly that. “We wanted to let the data speak for itself, creating an immediacy between data and audience,” says Liu.

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Photos by Yaxuan Liu (1), Eric Gunther (2) © SOSO

With its thin profile, exposed printed circuit boards, and CNC-milled aluminum structural elements, the sculpture proposes an aesthetics of transparency in opposition to the widespread manipulation and abuse of data that today undercut promises of technological progress. When a dataset is shown on the sculpture, the display at its base offers contextual information, educating visitors about the processes and outcomes of data science research.

Photo by Yaxuan Liu © SOSO

The piece was also conceived to help link the School of Data Science, located in a still-under-development precinct dubbed the Ivy Corridor, to the historic Jeffersonian campus. At night, the brightly illuminated sculpture, visible through floor-to-ceiling windows and reflected in a small pond, becomes a beacon that beckons to the main campus across the street.

Designed by SOSO, Data Structure rises 45 feet through the atrium of the School of Data Science's new building at the University of Virginia. Video courtesy SOSO

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