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Week 11 | Submission

The Last Book | Humanity

In 2050, it is the last legally printed book. It would have a complete catalogue of 'a day in the life' of many people from all over the world similar to what Youtube did with video. Each culture would explain what a day looks like for them without plants and the bodies of nature that used to be around them.

This book would be on display at The Life Museum.

Caption:

KwaZulu-Natal Province.

Abena spends her mornings pulling dried roots from the remnants of the oNgoye Forest. When broken down, they provide nutrition to the meals she scavenges for her family.

Caption: Tehran Province, Iran Ever since the grasslands started to dry up near his home of sixty years, Ehsan has tried to keep his sheep fed. His weaving business remains the last link to his deep-rooted culture.

The Brochure

Advertising the life Museum's Exhibitions. This would be delivered digitally to people in 2050 as there wouldn't be any paper to print it on. This could also come in different forms, for example, if social media maintains itself all this time, which is probable, then it could also become an advert.

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If you would like to see the Figma board of some of the research steps and the full design of the book and brochure: https://www.figma.com/file/NUGQ3ZCg3l3epU1CU3zXGX/Untitled

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Week 10

Overview

This week was basically just putting my head down and sorting out everything. Making three assets being the Museum Brochure, two small Exhibition Tiles to clarify the purpose of the Museum and a small narrative booklet that welcomes the reader into the world of 2050. In theory these aren't meant to be printed because of course if we ran out of trees, then there wouldn't be anything to print on- unless of course we developed some kind of synthetic paper but that's a different future.

But for the draft of letting the class see what I'm doing it would easier to have physical printouts so I just did those quickly.

There's not much to reflect on here, I was just very busy.

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Week Nine | Formative

Overview

There was a bit happening this week, also within the Studio paper, so my focus had somewhat shifted by this point. Balancing work is usually okay for me but with delays occurring I needed to prioritise other things before coming back to figure out a new direction in Research. I was prepared with my original narrative for formative but by the time I had gotten home I had thought it over and found it would be easier for me to switch directions.

Feedback from formative concluded I could probably push my ideas further, and so I wondered what would happen if we had no jungles or plant life at all. Probably nothing good. But I was more interested in what humanity would do in this case. Referring back to the four futures model we would still try to grow, overcome this challenge by adapting our environments to support ourselves. By taking out what was left and keeping it controlled. Enter The Life Museum. A massive complex created to store the remnants of plant life. Regulated environments would be maintained in order to preserve the bubbled eco-systems each country originally had.

Developing A New Narrative

I knew I didn't want my final to be a video, because we are already doing one in the studio as well and I haven't done a physical project in a while. I wanted to create assets that would support the narrative, and instead place the reader into the envisaged environment which would hopefully act to convince them that it could happen.

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Week 8

Overview

We did Manoa Scenario Building and created headlines. While doing this I was still working on the original concept of jungle cities so my headlines have since changed. My first narrative followed the life of a man working in central Auckland who wakes to tree-tops and canopies. Able to pick up fresh produce on his way to work from platform stalls that can be accessed between sky-bridges.

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30 years ahead, 30 years behind

It wasn't too hard to imagine this, I was envisioning steps to achieve the outcome all the while building a backing narrative and other possible futures that could occur in case of change happening.

Scenario Building

In reflection of this activity is was first hard to understand what we were needing to do and how to apply this to a final outcome because I had already built foundations for the result. I could see a narrative but wasn't sure if the headlines needed to be broad or completely specific at this point. It was the doubt at the point that had me leaning in a different direction by the time we did formative in week nine.

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Week 7

Overview

Here we started the new section of the project, I had a rough idea to start with but knew I needed to re-do a backing set of research to support it. It started with the idea of creating jungle-style city's akin to what you might see in Avatar. I had started a Figma board to explore this through a future wheel and accompanying models. But this wasn't really a fully-realized future as it wouldn't be too hard to achieve as identified in my formative draft presentation.

This week was relatively straightforward going through it, I had a direction I wanted to head into and just got to work with it.

Looking back I probably wouldn't have rushed as much but I wasn't sure what to expect or how long it might take me to synthesis into an actual final outcome so just to be safe I tried a few things.

Dator's Four Futures

This concept was helpful as it makes sense to me and especially within the context of today's world.

In my view of current events, I feel we currently sit between Growth and Collapse

We have been developing lots of things in the past fifty years and considering this surge of new technologies has only occurred recently, the idea that current systems continue to grow at their normal pace for as long as possible until they hit their limit is nothing new. But in relation to modern systems thinking, the growth of traffic is a big one. We had previously built roads only to support travel from point A to B. But as the population increases, more and more cars use these roads, which in turn requires expansion (growth). But there are only so many ways you can widen a road before you run out of space. And I experience that more and more, my bus rides home have gotten extremely long in a course of three years. Traffic congestion so dense along main roads I now prefer to get out six stops early and can walk the rest of the way- which is surprisingly faster than if I were to sit there and wait in a crawl.

This then hits a collapse. These current systems have reached their limits and aren’t able to support our future trajectory. We need to completely rethink how to plan cities (transformational), which is a big task, and probably why it's easier to patch things up than replace them altogether.

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Week 5 Reflection

Cross Impact Grids

This one was relatively straightforward, I first made a summary grid of general ways each factor (eg. political versus economic) elements impact each other, then took my impacts from the future wheels and compared them in the second grid. This was quite the task and took me longer than expected but it helped to see everything in one place and organise my thoughts going forward.

Wardley Maps

These were confusing at first, based on the examples given and what google provided after a quick search it seems these are mostly used for business modeling. So on my first attempt, I tried to dissect something that was closer to a product - the smart home system- just to understand how I could visualize a different concept like imports which is on a much larger scale and has many more factors and connecting parts to it.

On my first smart home map I have swapped out the y axis labels and they don't really seem to fit as much as digital/physical scale with a mixture of both existing in the middle section does for these components.

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https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lQKjpfQ=/

[To see the board properly]

Future Wheels for:

01- Spending more time at home

02- The Auckland Water Shortage

03- Increasing access to internet/associated technologies

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Week One + Two

Through thinking about how megatrends influence the way we live I started to brainstorm a list of noticeable behaviors that seemingly occur in todays world, whether I see them on the news, in social media or in the real world on my commutes.

Megatrends

COVID-19

The introduction to the world of global pandemics has certainly shaken the way we operate, changing communities, social interaction and just generally the way we as humans live everyday. In a sense, it has not been anything new, having already faced large scale viruses like the Spanish Flu, the plague and the common Flu itself, we have been here before- but there has been a drastic shift in lifestyles since then. Adapting to continue on has seen us become almost a digital civilization- and I am not too fond of it.

Economic Crisis

Covid has played a big part in bringing down the foundations of global and local trade. Slowing shipping times and reducing the amount of business physical stores can undertake means that a lot of people are doing it very hard all over the world. It is a double edged sword for our government- being on one hand stopping the spread will save the most at risk people’s lives, versus shutting down people’s livelihoods and ability to afford to live. 

Ecological Crisis

Alongside all of this our environments seem to be getting harsher each year, prolonged droughts, deforestation and the overall way we still manage to abuse our world is contributing to it’s downfall. With mindsets trying to shift the big corporations to stop being greedy and start thinking sustainably we still have a long way to go to repair this.

Digital Wars

And lastly, even with continued devastation of brutal wars in countries like Iran, we also have an invisible war right beneath our fingertips. The global owners of technology such as China, America and Russia fighting for information online. And not only this, but there has been increased risk of cyber crimes and privacy breaches.

Signals

spending more time at home

more emphasis on doing things ourselves [DIY] > more injuries > more ACC claims > more money spent at home depots

no money for extras, we save more and spend less > financial management has become important 

more people using the internet to connect

increased cyber crime

More people mindlessly swiping through insta (again and again)

lack of materials/imports > stores closing > prices increase > higher cost of living 

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Final Case Study

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Counselling Details - the template for how other services details will look using responsive design.

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Services | Responsive design

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About Us | Responsive design

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Home Page | responsive design

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Coming up with a design system to apply to following website pages. Then creating the About us page, keeping in mind the grey sections on the right to reflect ‘blocks’ that will be visible for users at full screen.

Edits: Made top section text bigger and changed banner image. Also changed colour of current viewing page to appear as blue to show it is active. [beneath main title ‘About Us’]

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I have tried to test a blue system here, so not to make it too serious or business-like. I have also added a soft overlay to each image to tie every asset back together. In general I have clean-swept the margins to all line up and follow through down the page, added video duration and an extra backing to the ‘who we are’ section and last but not least curved the corners on the supporting video previews.

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Testing colours. Both of these are lacking still and don’t really attribute to our target audience. It is hard to convey a trusting yet soft approach through colour but we are getting close.

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Applying first layer of feedback to the design- not focusing on colour at this stage. Spacing is not accurate in this screenshot but we focused more on making each section equal.