Today we are brainstorming more concepts for a design project that would essentially embed an ethical or valuable idea, and expresses creative elements.

We are beginning by each writing down our personal interests or general ideas - in consideration of one another’s interests, we hope that this task might generate some new concepts, instead of sticking to one topic or idea.

We jotted down some ethical issues in the present day - one of them was Deforestation. This is an ongoing global issue affecting the environment as trees provide crucial sources for living creatures to maintain life.

Concept idea one: Essentially there’d be a wall which is basically a timeline with a series of photographs of rainforest trees and anything that inhabits the rainforests e.g. animals, plants, insects, until the very end where the images begin to merge into photographs of blackness. The wall of images would be paired with a soundscape of audio recordings of rainforest sounds and animal noises. The user walks alongside the wall until reaching the end, the black photographs, then the audio begins to turn silent. Billions of trees are cut down each year for human convenience is the significance of this concept. We are killing the environment and many of us sweep it under the rug and forget about it.

Patrick suggested we could try this concept with the photographs. Essentially, the user would walk alongside a blank wall (I’d imagine it is either black or white) and focus on the soundscape. Sounds more interesting because the user would also have to interpret the concept rather than us just plastering it there. He also suggested that we could use clocks instead of photographs, which can represent the data of the subject. He also made an interesting reference to Doomsday clock, a metaphorical clock coined by the Scientific community to essentially predict the extinction of humanity.

Focussing and investing more effort into the audio recordings would make it easier for us, as well, but using visual data would improve the project aesthetic appearance yet we are far from that stage at the moment. We can focus on the technical elements first and getting the arduino to work.This project idea is essentially a combination of ‘Data objects’ and Physical computing. If we decide to go ahead with this concept, we would use the Arduino to control the audio - when the sound plays and stops etc.

We have come up with other ideas, so far, of various topics. We have to still decide on what topic would be suitable and just a cool project in general to make. We’d need to consider it with the timeframe and limited resources and experience.

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