Meshu.io: Jewelry Made of Maps, Data and Lasers
South America earrings. Model: Bad Charlotte. Hair: Lorenzo Diaz. Makeup: Meeks Baker. Photo: Nadya Lev.
Meshu is a company that turns location data into jewelry. The brainchild of data visualists Rachel Binx and Sha Hwang, Meshu allows you to enter locations (places you’ve lived, bars you love to go to, cities you’ve visited) and, based on those locations, it generates a graphic of interconnected coordinates overlaid on a map. That shape, called a “meshu,” gets laser-cut or 3D-printed out of wood, acrylic or metal into earrings, a pendant or cufflinks, and mailed to you.
US National Parks Meshu
Thus, all the places where you went on fun dates in a city can become a pair of earrings, and all the places you’ve been arrested can turn into an elaborate pendant. You can also connect to the site with Foursquare and create meshus out of your checkins. The site aims to keep the connection between the object and the information alive, and each meshu you make has a unique url (for example, here’s Racheland Sha’s trip to Iceland.) “Whether or not wearing a map is your thing,” writes Mark Wilson at FastCoDesign, “I can imagine a future where, more and more, the things we buy and wear depict something abstract and personal about our lives.”
San Francisco Neighborhoods pendant. Model: Enid Hwang. Hair: Lorenzo Diaz. Makeup: Meeks Baker. Photo: Nadya Lev.