In the center of Harvard Square in Cambridge, you'll find over five dozen flowers hanging neatly in organized rows. As pretty as the flowers look walking by, they are conveying an important message.

The installation is called "Heat Blooms" and it was created by University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Carolina Aragón. The public art serves as a visual thermometer that interacts with the weather to highlight the dangers of extreme heat in Massachusetts.

"Heat has the biggest impact on our health. And one of the things that is hard is that it's usually invisible. A tornado we can see, flooding we can see, heat we can't see so much," said public artist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Carolina Aragon. "The idea about this is to call attention to the health threats that extreme heat causes."

How the flowers work

Here's how it works: the installation's smart memory alloy wires hold colorful vinyl flowers. Once the temperature hits 85 degrees in direct sunlight, the flowers bloom.

"So we started with a core of nitinol wire, which is an alloy that is heated to a very high temperature and set to a shape. And it then remembers that shape as it gets hotter and hotter. And when it gets cooler and cooler, the shape becomes less rigid and it sort of blooms. So we have our blooming as it gets hot, and then we have a drooping, a weight to get it to close when it gets cool," said UMass Amherst graduate student Nikolas Dombrowski, who worked on the display.

The number of the flowers was purposefully chosen to represent the effects of urban heating.

"The number of flowers, 67 back there, represents the number of calls made to 911 due to extreme heat issues in the city of Cambridge during the last four years," says Aragon.

These Heat Blooms are part of a larger collection of artworks in the Greater Boston area that bring attention to climate and environmental issues. You can stop by Brattle Square, in front of Bluestone Lane, to see the display until September 28.