Credit cards are usually deemed as private and personal objects.
They contain information that we don’t normally see; however, we
use them daily to conduct our personal transactions. In many cases,
a level of trust is usually required wherever we use them. The card’s
data becomes “secret” information, and revealing or seeing the
cards digital signature can become uncomfortable in certain situations.
Using Processing and a credit card reader, I modified code to create a visual representation of the information embedded on the magnetic stripe. As a card is swiped,
each digit translated into a specific spirographic pattern and color.
Each sequence created different formations creating a unique and
dynamically changing signature for each card.
The visualizer became a playful way to visualize the information.
Though there was still a trust barrier to overcome, participants became
more intrigued after seeing the different patterns that different
types of cards would form.
