This article was taken from the November 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
The absurdity of Los Angeles life struck designer Benedikt Gross once he'd gained a perspective on the city. "I was flying in for a study trip during the first year of my Royal College of Art degree, and I saw all these swimming pools," recalls Gross, 33. It looked like there were millions. It was crazy." Pools being social indicators, he wondered what would happen if they were mapped alongside other data sets. So, with California-based geographer Joseph Lee, he began The Big Atlas of LA Pools.
After an aborted attempt at mapping them themselves -- their computer kept misidentifying roofs or cars as pools -- the pair turned to clippingfactory, an India-based service mostly used by companies which need photographs edited for sales catalogues. Gross, however, asked it to manually trace more than 43,000 pools. "It was cheap -- it's interesting how we began the project in LA and here we were in India dealing with cheap labour issues." The resulting images were then analysed by crowdsourcing marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Did the dataset reveal the patterns he expected? "There are correlations between pools and crime, but I think that's just because there's less crime in rich areas."
A more intriguing outcome, he says, was how pool shapes function as fingerprints for neighbourhoods. Poorer areas have more rectangular pools (as these are public facilities); wealthy areas have different shapes.
The most valuable result, he says, was the act of trying to reach a result: "We thought the project would reveal a correlation between something like the Sex Offender List and pools. But it's just about the process of how to create a dataset as crazy as that."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
