Project Data Sense combines algorithmic design with creative coding to create multi-sensory data experiences that enhance emotional engagement and accessibility.




04

Moonflower


Mapping Lunar Rhythms through Generative Bloom.


 Moonflower is a generative visualization that traces the moon's phases through the form of a flower. The project began with a real moon flower, a plant grown from a seed packet that had sat dormant in the garage for a season, encountered in full bloom on a walk and later identified by its namesake trait: moon flowers open and close in sync with the night sky. That discovery reconnected the work to an earlier sketch built in p5.js, one that pulled live moon phase data from an API and attempted to render the moon accurately in step with it, a technical exercise that felt incomplete until it had a form worth building toward.


Moonflower, 2026. Custom software (p5.js), generative visualization; variable dimensions. Live moon phase data drives a kaleidoscopic bloom that opens, closes, and reconfigures across the lunar cycle, echoing the plant's own photonastic rhythm.

APPLICATION



FLOWER GENERATOR
The current piece merges that moon phase sketch with a kaleidoscope system originally built for a student, layering lunar data into a set of formal parameters, angle, distance, size, and ring count, that reshape the flower as the moon moves through its cycle. Rather than displaying the phase as a number or icon, the system lets the data bloom: the flower's fullness, symmetry, and density shift in step with the sky.

Like the tides and the body's own cycles, the moon offers a quiet model for responsiveness, an ongoing external rhythm rather than a fixed state. Moonflower treats that rhythm as material: a reminder that data, like light, can move.

ENERGY BODIES

BIRD SOUNDS

WEATHER DATA

MOONFLOWER

ABOUT


Thomas Jefferson Universtiy
Visual Communication Design
4201 Henry Ave, 
Philadelphia, PA  19144  Information
 Email
 Instagram