The weather observatory in Central Park has operated in its current location at Belvedere Castle since 1920. Since then, weather instruments on its roof have been measuring and relaying weather data to a government agency charged with collecting weather information throughout the country. Because of its location in a world-famous park, this castle is undoubtedly the most visited of thousands of such data collection points around the country. Unfortunately, the symbolic importance of this site as a landmark in modern weather observation has been sadly overlooked.

The Existing Kiosk in 2004

Standardized data on weather conditions at this location is archived going back 80 years. Making this dense mass of data available could emphasize to visitors of this site the importance of weather observation as not a prosaic and distant phenomenon, but as both a hyper-local occurrence (this one point, right now) and a continuously evolving store of knowledge (this one point, at any or all periods between 1920 and today.)

My approach to redesigning the weather kiosk at Belvedere Castle is to highlight and celebrate the castle’s historical significance by allowing visitors to casually browse over temperature data collected at that location since January 1, 1920, when the station became operational. Temperature is the most basic measure of weather conditions, and as such is a natural choice when presenting only one dimension of weather data. Temperature also has as an advantage that it is cyclical over long periods of time, but the historical archive also records a rich variety of extreme highs and lows, as well as exceptional patterns, in a measurement that is easy to relate to.

The Existing UI in 2004

Visitors will be able to manipulate their view of dynamic temperature data graphs over the castle’s 80-year historical record. Navigating these graphs, visitors will be able to compare historical conditions to current ones, search for extremes, or view broad patterns by week, month, year or decade. The presentation of this data should be in a simple visual manner with an intuitive interface, so that visitors can spend anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes browsing. The display will also present current weather conditions to the viewer at all times, regardless of what point or period they are browsing over. This is in order to emphasize the important idea that it (and the visitor themself) is part of a living system, a reminder that history is a continuing story.

The scope of this design exploration was to produce a concept statement followed by three iterative designs that were revised and refined in order to best realize the goals stated in the concept statement (above.) Below are screenshots of the three versions that were developed:

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The first version was heavily influenced by the New York Times temperature graph. I chose a simple bar graph, with each bar representing a day, since the full historical data features only highs and lows.

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The second version split the historical data and daily recordings into two seperate charts, but it seemed too complicated and cluttered for a kiosk screen that would only be browsed casually.

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The third version simplifies the statement more, and integrates the current day’s high and low temperature into the same axis as the historical data. A pair of knobs on the kiosk face would allow users alternately scrub forward and backward in time and zoom in and out to show more or fewer days. The gray column represents the current day and remains static, while the historical data at left can be browsed. Thus the visitor can always be comparing the current day’s temperature data to any sequence of the historical record.