For the past few weeks, I have served as Fathom's in-residence explorer of 3D printed information design with Formlabs’ Form1+ printer. Because my goal was to focus on the physical medium and form, I tried to stay away from directly 3D-ifying data visualizations that already exist in 2D (think extruded line graphs, bar graphs, etc.), or from arbitrarily mapping data points onto 3D space for the sake of aesthetics. Instead, I zeroed in on the features of physical objects that cannot be expressed on a screen, breaking them into two categories: material and interaction. More on forks later.

Continuing our fascination with color naming across cultures, we set our summer intern, Malika Khurana, on a journey to discover new colors. Color naming, no matter your language, is a verbal process. So one of the driving interests was to see how this could be integrated into a mobile app using speech recognition. In this post, Malika retells her adventure.