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Topic 2 Development

Topic 2 Development

For Assignment #2, I initially began with “Homelessness in NYC” but after a few days, decided to change to another topic. I wanted to do a topic on technology and its effects on climate change. I wanted to narrow down the topic to something specific, and also seemingly harmless, so that the audience will be motivated to change their habits for a larger cause.

Topic: How junk email contributes to climate change

Stakeholders: Email users, businesses who send junk email, companies that host email servers, earth’s climate, humans on earth

Critical Analysis: How does ignoring subscription/junk emails has a carbon footprint

Form/Affordances: A possible form I am considering is a website that demonstrates the impact of people’s personal junk mail.

Intended experience/outcome: The goal is to motivate people to look through their emails and unsubscribe to emails they frequently ignore.

Daily Practice – Day 5 (2022-10-23)

As I finished reading Sunscreens and Photoaging: A Review of Current Literature, I was struct by how much jargon there is in not only this article, but also a lot of articles discussing skincare in general. It makes the decisions we make about what sunscreen is best for us, and the environment extremely difficult. This word cloud is representative of an idea to display all of the jargon, scientific and chemical words that a consumer has to wade through while making this choice. For this representation, I parsed the words from Sunscreens and Photoaging and spent a bit of time deciding a set of words to not include in the image – mostly removing common words that were not specific to sunscreen research. This process itself was pretty interesting. From the perspective of data integrity, this feels like cheating – I was manipulating the data which changed the outcome of the representation which leads into some questions I had with project 1 regarding scientific accuracy within art projects. Maybe this is okay, if the intention and process is clear to the audience?

I created a small ruby script to manipulate the data, that I’ll also include here:

Topic 2: Plant communities and communication

For my second topic, I am going to stick in a similar vein with where I was on topic 1, looking at plants. I think I will dig into the communities these plants form, and look into how those communities are structured, what analogs to communication they have, and consider plant “expression.” Not sure exactly where this will go, but that’s my jumping off point.

Daily Practice – Day 4 (2022-10-22)

For today’s daily practice, I wanted to push myself to do something less digital. Something that has always perplexed and frustrated me about sunscreen is how imperfect it is. I have a family history of skin cancer, and have struggled with skin damage myself. It’s discouraging to drench myself in sunscreen and still get burned, so I was playing with that idea. In the last painting, I’m poking fun at that a bit by envisioning that the whole world of the character is covered in sunscreen, and they still get burned. How do we enjoy the outdoors without risking our health?

I’m also including a photo of myself at the beach this past summer because I find it amusing, and it was partially my inspiration for today’s practice. Completely covered by several layers of sunscreen, a long sleeve shirt, a hat, a towel, just to enjoy being outside.

Assignment 2 – Topic Development

(Updated on Oct 28)

  • Topic: Parenting – Psychology –  Chinese parents’ anxiety about education
  • Stakeholders: parents, students, teachers, Education Bureau
  • Critical analysis:
    1. What causes or increases Chinese parents’ anxiety about education?
    2. What’s the negative impact on kids?
    3. As parents, how to cope with the anxiety?
    4. How government and Education Bureau can help reduce the anxiety?
  • Expected outcome:
    1. Convey the idea that how parents’ anxiety negatively impact kids’ growth
    2. Provide some solutions to help reduce anxiety
    3. Reflection on public anxiety

 

—-

  • Topic:

Time Zone: Connection and Barrier

  • Target Audience:

Kids and people who has interest in time zone

  • Critical Questions:
    • How Time Zone identified?
    • How different countries with a large territory deal with time zone?
    • In this digital world, can technology help people in different time zone communicate better?
    • How to set up some policies or principles (similar to standard time zone), which can reduce communication barrier in different regions and cultures?

 

Assignment 2 topic

Inclass note:

Topic: buddhism

Answers: Because the topic is too large, I want to scope it down. So far, I am thinking about a specific Buddhist figure, an ideology, a quote or a suggestion from buddhism. However, i feel the topic is too serious, so the form of guide might be boring and not attractive if i don’t use a proper one.

Monika: yes, you can narrow it down to one figure/narrative. Ask critical questions about why that figure? Why that story? Why that aesthetic?  What demographic does it represent?  Who does it now represent? Maybe look at comparisons cross-culture, through eras and ask more questions.

 

Progress:

Topic: buddhism,  more specific, Avalokitesvara figure

System map: I will use concept map to organize the information of Avalokitesvara. I will research on its origin, history and the figures in different countries. 

Stakeholders: Buddhist, Buddha related commodity, merchant.

Critical Analysis: I might consider the reason and the influence of Avalokitesvara’s localization.

Form/Affordances: The form might be a game, or it might be a map which show the path of Avalokitesvara figure’s spread.

Metaphor: I am still considering the metaphor, I might be use a map as the instruction to show Avalokitesvara’s localization.

Tone: Serious.

Intended experience/outcome: My intention probably is letting audience distinguish different form of Avalokitesvara and knowing the affect of its figure and even buddhism’s localization.

Daily Practice – Day 2 (2022-10-20)

Today I began reading a journal article, Sunscreens and Photoaging: A Review of Current Literature, which touched a bit on the different wave lengths of light on the Electromagnetic Spectrum. I realized a few connections that this topic has to previous interested of mine in the past, which is kind of cool – it’s seem there is an underlying theme that I hadn’t realized.

  • Over the summer, I had a general idea of focusing some of my work on invisible forces, or things that effect our lives but can’t necessarily be seen or experienced in a tangible way. By focusing my research on sunscreen, I unintentionally am choosing to focus on screening another invisible force!
  • At my first job as a software engineer, the company’s name referenced infrared light, and the intention was to emulate a force that is strong but can’t necessarily be seen or felt. I loved this association, and here am I looking at light rays again!

From that article, I was really interested in getting to compare the wavelengths of rays that are visible vs ones that are not. And seeing which wavelengths are harmful vs ones that are helpful. It’s such a small difference in the length of a light ray that can change it into something really dangerous.

Updating to add some notes I took while reading the article and to provide some further explanation of the image above. The color spectrum + the gray on either sides is illustration the different wave types, in order of their wavelengths, from smallest to largest. The blue is sunscreen – I’ve been playing around with the idea of what it would be like if in the future, fashion evolved to valued brightly pigmented face makeup with sunscreen properties. I don’t think that this future is that far off, and am interested to dig more into that line of thought. And the pink circles are the skin, with different rays effecting different parts of the skin layers.

Assignment 2 Topic

Topic:

Cultural bias in (olfactory) assessment.

Inspiration:

Once I was taking olfactory testing for research. The machine released an odor for each question and asked the user to choose the odor’s image. But some odors in this test were not common in China because it was imported from the US.

Possible angles:

For the assessment and machine inventors, they might take the cultural difference in mind after viewing the work.

For other people, they might notice the uniqueness of the odor and think more about the odor, culture, and life.

 

Assignment 2 Topic Selection

Plan for Assignment 2 for now (10/20/2022):

Topic:

Culture – Language – Deletion of words’ pronunciation in Mandarin.

Point of view:

The deletion of words’ pronunciation in Mandarin reduces the rhythmic beauty of some ancient poems. On the other hand, it reduces the pressure of learning the language for the beginner.

Stakeholders:

  • Poet, Mandarin speaker, Mandarin learner, historian, the young generation in mainland China

Target Audience:

  • Mandarin speaker, Mandarin learner, the government (not sure about this)

Intended experience/outcome:

  • Three different layers of outcome are expected:
    1. For the most audience: feel the beauty of the ancient poems.
    2. The second level: realize the change in the poems’ pronunciations somehow destroy the beauty.
    3. The third level (if possible): this action would lead to the loss of  traditional culture

Related articles (in mandarin):