The word cloud is connected to a microprocessor that controls a series of valves, and at any given moment, you can press a button to create a drink in which the flavours represent the tweets at that exact moment.

"What's fun about this project is that it's actually an integration of hardware and software," says Jarlath. "There's the conceptual side of figuring out how do we pull the data, how do we organize the data, but then how to we actually physically manifest that into a cup?"

But the question remains: Why try to taste data?

"We're dealing with massive data sets today, in our research and in our daily lives, and we have to have tools to understand how to interpret the data we're presented with." says Irwin. "There's a lot of visual strategies emerging, but often those visual strategies still remain limited in their ability to represent the data that they're showing... So the next question really can be how can we integrate more senses as well, that would be an obvious extension of this."

It all fits into the theme of BevLab. "We really are just using this as a space to explore beverage and food as something more than just a product that we consume and forget about," says Irwin. "So this is another theme on our message on food intent and food consciousness to start to think about what it is we are consuming, and have fun with it, of course."

"And to build drink-mixing robots," adds Jarlath.