Final Project: Project Proposal
I. Plastic Ocean 🌊
This project is designed based on the fact that sea turtles are currently eating plastic bags more than jellyfish and other ocean creatures. I believe this is a serious situation that the plastic bags we discard are all feed into turtles’ mouths and are causing them sick, or even death. According to the article, “What do sea turtles eat? Unfortunately, plastic bag,” because the plastic bags are very similar to jellyfish and sea turtles can’t distinguish them accurately, and there are so many plastic wastes in the ocean, the turtles are likely to eat plastic rubbish instead of their original food–jellyfish. Inspired by this article, I want to make something that can allow people to see this serious situation that the plastic bags they throw away are destroying sea turtles’ lives in that they won’t see this under-ocean scene by themselves in their real life. As a result, I want to make a project that can alarm people about the danger of decreasing “animal biodiversity” in the ocean.
I am going to use a water tank in my project to imitate the ocean environment and I want to put the plastic bags in the water. The challenge that I want to address in the project is how to use the sensor to create the effect that the plastic garbage bags move with the hands outside the water tank. My audience will be people who don’t understand the situation of sea turtles in the depths of the ocean, but who pay attention to the ecological environment and animal biodiversity. I hope that my project can let more people realize the fact that what we discard has created a large living problem for the creatures that live in the ocean. As a result, they might be more aware of where the plastic garbage they throw away will end up and they will care more about the garbage classification.
II. 🎨 Paint With Your Body!
As far as I know, students from college, middle school, and other grades are having a great level of stress in their academic studies. According to my research, there are many ways that can help students to release their stress. From all of them, I think doing sports and making arts are both very useful ways to decrease the level of stress. However, a lot of young people (including me) don’t have time or may often feel lazy to do sports or paint a well-designed image. So I think it’s important to encourage people to use these two ways to relieve themselves. From the article “How to Relieve Stress With Art Therapy” I found that “You may experience flow when you’re practicing an instrument, playing a sport, gardening, writing, painting, or drawing.” The flow described here can help people reduce their level of stress. After reading the article, I came up with an idea that combining the sport and the painting together might have a much more useful effect. So I want to create a product that can improve young people’s wellness.
In my design, there will be a large board filled with buttons that are assigned to different parts. Users can select images that they want to paint on the computer, then they will need to tap certain buttons. Since the buttons are arranged in different heights and different positions, users need to jump up or squat down. By moving the body to click these different buttons, separate parts of the image will appear on the computer until the user finish the whole painting. So the challenge that I am going to address is how to connect all these buttons to my computer. My intended audience is students who feel stressed in their studies and this project’s intended impact will be that young people will experience less stress after playing with this product.
III. Rumors
We are living in a world where information is spreading extremely quickly. Every minute, when people are just clicking on their mobile phones, thousands of messages will come to their eyes and are waiting to be viewed. However, how many of them are real and trustworthy? How many of them are Rumors and need to be thrown away? It’s so difficult that most people cannot distinguish real news from fake ones. From my own experience, I realized that many old people are likely to believe everything that they see on the Internet. According to The Washington Post, a study shows that “misinformation on Facebook got six times more clicks than factual news during the 2020 election”. This astonishing figure shows that so many people were confused by false information. Thus I want to design a project that expresses my concern about the situation that people nowadays are surrounded by misinformation.
In my design, I want to create a shelf that is filled with different booklets that are printed with several different keywords. If the audience randomly picks up one or some of them, they will hear that someone is broadcasting news that can easily be found to be wrong. In other words, they will hear rumors instead of real and reliable information. The challenge I want to address in this project is that how can I link the sound of broadcasting to the Processing. I think this product is meant to show to those who like to search for information online and those who are receiving dozens of information every minute. I hope that this project will help people to notice that what they see or hear on the Internet is not necessarily correct. By noticing this reality, they can start to think about whether they should take in everything they get from the Internet and think about the trustworthiness of the information they get.
