Small Board
Fabrication | Arduino | Interactive Sculpture
What is it?
Small Board is an interactive miniature scenery that recreates the turbulence in the stock market. It is designed to be hand-held and portable, making it convenient to simulate the status of the stock you bought whenever and wherever. Please note that the simulation is fake.
The built-in light has three modes: all green, all red, and chaotic. You are more than welcome to switch to all-green mode if that makes you happy. Small Board is simply a representation of how our mood, our happiness, and even our fates are strongly associated with the ups and downs in the market.
the Volatility
The year of 2022 is a volatile year for stock. CNN Business website even posted an article named Investors Have Very Little to Be Thankful for in 2022 recently right before Thanksgiving holiday. Here’s a brief summary of this year’s economy.
The S&P 500 has plunged 17% this year, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq is in a bear market, having plummeted nearly 30%. Cryptos have crashed. AMC (AMC), Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) and other meme stocks have imploded. The housing market is starting to show signs of strain. There’s not much to cheer in this market and economy.
Scott Clemons, chief investment strategist at BBH
“2022 has provided a timely reminder that volatility is a feature of financial markets, not a bug. We enjoyed upside volatility from 2020 through 2021, and 2022 reminded us that what goes up will occasionally go down.”
Stock prices do fluctuate frequently. The prices are affected by supply and demand and can increase and decrease multiple times within a single trading day.
The Standard and Poor's 500, or simply the S&P 500, is a stock market index tracking the stock performance of 500 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States.
Why do I care
The reason why I started to care so much about stock is I am double majoring in Business Economics, but MOST IMPORTANTLY is because I invested my pocket money on stock and I have been losing money. I now empathize with those unhappy shareholders on a very personal level. It strikes me how people’s lives can be tightly bonded with the stock market. For me, it means at most losing some money and feeling frustrated for a while. But for some people, a bad economy could make them lose everything.
Initial Design Concept
I then came up with the initial design of Small Board. I named it Day Ruiner at first. a hand-held device that informs you of real-time market conditions through color, and depending on the situation, it may or may not affect your mood of the day. Green means the value has increased since the last second and Red means decrease.