Author: Katherine Li

-Interactive Trash-

Group Members: Hope, Katherine, Carlo, Sebastian

For this project, we hope to design a game on a website with an interactive comic format.

What we have so far is a webpage with the NY skyline. The story follows the journey of a trash bag once it’s carried into the NY harbor by a gust of wind. As the trash bag sinks into the ocean, it encounters different marine animals at different depths as indicated by the anchor on the right side of the page. Each encounter with a character (ex. microbead, plastic bag, dolphin) is accompanied by dialogue that has a fact about plastic in the ocean. When you move your cursor, the trash bag follows. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zdD4RLfsXtvCkGyYCND9d6UCBNt8_fDz/view?usp=sharing

The goal is to ultimately make our game more New York Harbor-centric. We hope to incorporate tools that scientists will use underwater such as a magnifying glass to draw attention to particles that go unseen such as microplastics that are as small as 5mm; more trash in the water to illustrate how most wastes do not simply float at the top of the water; and possibly new, unexpected ecosystems underwater such as recycled subway carts.

For this coming week, we will finalize on the storyboard, characters, and research; continue to work on the website by incorporating new characters; and begin to brainstorm on the audio component.

I wanted to keep track of how I spent my time in a given week. Most of the time we are bombarded by distractions, so other than the major events where I spent blocks of time, I also logged how often I was distracted by activities such as social networking and video watching.

I visualized each time segment by using boxes with different slashes to indicate increments of time from 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and 1 hour. The individual colors represent each activity.

“A Four-Century Retrospective of Marine Fauna and Fisheries Around New York City” provided a lot of data on the consumption trends and the diversity of species in the waters surrounding New York, from the harbor to the tips of Long Island. It still amazes me that there are dolphins that migrate offshore through the harbor between feeding and breeding grounds. It was strange to also learn that what is now a rich man’s food — i.e. oyster and lobster was once a poor man’s diet.

“The Ainu: Beyond the Politics of Cultural Coexistence” covered the historical background of the Ainu people and the struggle that they have faced as Japan has modernized. The takeaway from this article is to understand the marriage between ‘reconciliation’ and ‘coexistence’. The Ainu want their culture to be understood, to be appreciated alongside with the popular culture of Japan, but they do not want to to be boiled down as people of primitive culture.

The WCS information sheet provided an introduction to the projects they are currently working on in addition to the communities they serve. There are a lot of data points to work with. My greatest appreciation for the WCS is their dedication to teaching the youth about conservation and the opportunities they offer for free access to locations such as the Bronx Zoo.