The given assignment is to create a data physicalization concept that is both informative and provocative, in a single physical artefact. In the slides there were given areas as inspiration or starting points to work with. The area we had most interest in was sustainability, so our brainstorm session started within this area. Starting with a diverging phase we tried to come up with many potential topics, so that we later could agree and decide to work further with one of them (converge). During the session we came up with a lot of ideas, of course not all of them caught our interest for further exploration.
The topic of world population, more specifically overpopulation, caught our interest. It’s a very sensitive topic since there’s many different political views on how to tackle the issue. I mentioned that I had seen a webpage that shows live data for the world population, such as in current population, deaths and births per day and per year. The contrast in numbers wasn’t that much of a surprise, somewhere in the back of the head we knew, but still the difference in birth rates compared to deaths are huge, which means we’re rapidly increasing in population.
We saw opportunity in taking this data to create a both informative and provoking data physicalization. An idea I had, to represent the overpopulation of the world, was to have an arm with a needle, slowly forwarding to a balloon (representing the earth). The needle, respresenting the population with the use of the data of birth & death rates from the webpage, would slowly approach the balloon. It could be very provocative to see that the needle would get closer. I liked that it could create some kind of tension seeing the needle approaching slowly, when will the earth pop?
The question is, how can we make it understandable? Right now it would be an abstract artefact of an arm with a needle approaching the balloon (earth), which could be interpreted as just representing time left until the earth pops? Also, it seems to be mostly provocative and not that informative. There’s no real estimation of when we’re overpopulated enough that the world would ”go under”, so popping the balloon would be a speculative idea. The execution of the idea was not perfect but the concept was still something we wanted to work with.
We further discussed other ideas within the concept of overpopulation. We all liked the idea of the earth getting overflown due to overpopulation, so we explored new possible ways of conveying the message. However, it’s challenging to find the balance of informing and provoking. We all feel that provoking is the easiest to create.
With the idea of the earth getting overflown as a provocation, we had to find ways how to be informative. We came up with a concept that was inspired by an hour glass where in the top half shows the tree of life and the bottom part is the globe. We had some discussions of what the top half should be, first we thought of a baby, then an egg, but we landed on the tree since we thought it symbolizes life the most.
The tree, which symbolizes life (tree of life), would drop down sand into the globe. The globe has a printed picture of earth on it to be more informative of what it is. The sand itself represents the population, and the movement of it dropping down into the globe symbolize the birth rate of world population. To symbolize the death rate of the population, we thought that the globe should leak out the same sand, though through a smaller hole in the bottom, since the death rate is much less than compared to the number of births. Since we had the problem of not knowing when the earth would ”overflow”, we will have to say that our installation will be lasting for a long long time. Maybe not super well thought through but I think it works.
Having the idea somewhat clear to ourselves, we decided to go for it. To conceptualize it further, we used the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) model that was introduced to us during the lecture on Monday. The use of this model seems useful to unpack the concept for ourselves, thus improving the design process. Additionally, it seems to be a good way to communicate the concept and design process for the audience. The first sketch we created was about the concept, explaining it through the sketch, much like a storyboard.
I think that our idea can seem a bit harsh, but overpopulation is one of the largest problems to earth. We want to make people aware of the negatives overpopulation causes to the earth, as we live our lives now. I think that it is important how we angle our idea. Instead of having it only becoming “stop making babies”, we could in some way make our point that everyone has to change their behavior, such as consumption, water usage, etc, due to the fact that we become more and more people every day and year. The earth’s resources aren’t infinite.
Next thing to do is to create sketches for the FBS and then create a prototype!
Reflective design journal 