Kristiana

Week 3 was research/prototyping week for us. I found the readings insightful in terms of behavioural change and systems thinking, even the extra reading filled with chemical formulas for how plastic is made was interesting (I ended up watching videos on the plastics and water cycles afterwards —links below—). After reading Leveraging Social Change, I called my sister, who is majoring in Behavioral Health and Psychology, and we discussed ways in which we could change a system to behave differently from their status quo into a long term benefit. The one factor we both came to conclusion was emotions–people need to feel that change is needed. It was a very abstract talk but the main takeaway I want to bring to Earth Day is the need to empathize with others on the subject of plastics and water.

 

Interesting informational videos I’ve found related to water, plastic, and the overall climate crisis, some things to think about:

 

Water Flint Michigan’s water crisis in 3min

Why a storm surge can be the deadliest part of a hurricane

H2O-NO! – Fresh Water Problems: Crash Course Kids

Plastics Crash Course on polymers

What will it take to get plastics out of the ocean?

Social Climate Change (aka we’re screwed but there may be hope for us after all…) Why humans are so bad at thinking about climate change

Going green shouldn’t be this hard

These are ideas that come to mind when thinking about the problems ahead, I’ll try to keep them open-ended, it would be interesting to run them through with the kids

 

Ideas generated by me and Angela, tell me what you think!!!

  • An interactive story following the life cycle of a microbead that gets eaten by a lobster and ends up in the body of a human
  • An infographic that reveals data (or government secrets) when you wear special glasses
  • A dome projection live stream videos/images of plastic lying around (look at Baykeeper website and social media)
  • Multiplayer AR game where players collaborate to prevent companies and corporations from throwing pieces of plastic at them
  • A book about a boy and water (kind of like The Giving Tree story)
  • An installation where you pick up a piece of wood (ipad) and when you pass a source of water (motion sensors), they play a sound. And we will call it Rain Dance.
  • A text-based game where the participants receive missions throughout the day related to water or plastic

Ivy: In this week, we move forward with our ideas about water-pollution and plastics based on our brainstorming and research in last two weeks. We divide into teams again and dig deeper about our character in this project. We are invader, intervener and mediator at the same time. Understanding our role in this project is really important. We also did the prototype again in a more realistic but still creative way. In our team(me and Joya), we made an interactive room and build in a cute character “puddle” for water. In the interactive room, visitor will play with the plastic bottles and find a right way to treat them correctly. Base on the technology aspect, I feel like this is totally possible. But I think we might need to do more user test, and figure out how to design the interaction to make it more effective.