This week was consisted of two supervisions and additional group work. In addition to all the material we gathered from brainstorming, we also obtained feedback from the supervisors on how to move ahead.
We tried answering our speculative questions and also doing more brainstorming, expanding on issues we’ve found:
- What would happen if we privatized the sea? People buy pieces of the moon, so why not the corals? Tied to the nature through privatization: people seem to care about their small gardens but not about the rainforests. So what provides motivation to care for the ocean?
- Hawaii will forbid certain types of sunscreen: Sunscreen became a big thing we discussed about, the cream gets to the corals, and is actually a major pollutant of the oceans.
- We should take advantage of natural oceanic forces?
By now we’ve begun leaning more towards coral reefs and the preservation of them, corals are the lungs of the ocean and they are in fact living organisms. They’re a crucial part of the ocean’s ecosystem and is an essential part of the underwater food chain. It’s important to not let them die out.
What can we do to nourish the corals?
Post Supervision Monday:
Insights gathered, questions to think about:
- What do we want to say about coral reefs?
- Are we too general? Be more specific!
- Local or global to be sustainable?
- Territorial aspect: territory is a politically tense phenomenon
- Set a scope!
- Create an interesting twists: find things to twist, it’s speculative, don’t find a solution
- Decide on what seems the most pressing, relevant, current issue of the corals
- Discursive design is about discourse: what do we want to say with our project?
- What is the audience? Or are we designing for individual actions?
We thought about trash that nourishes the ecosystem: embedding nourishment into destructive actions, that could be a valid twist, but maybe not provocative enough?
Our discourse (Since we need to be more specific):
Sunscreen from people’s skin becomes part of the ocean’s flora and fauna. It affects life under water: it makes the life under water AND humans sick. We’re getting ourselves sick!
Then it was time to further develop our concept, creating awareness for sunscreen and how it’s harmful to corals.
Sunscreen🌞:
Objective: Is to inform, so we may offer a new understanding of what sunscreen does to the ecosystem, since the truth is that we do not grasp the scope of how suncream functions in our ecosystem. It needs to be made aware of.
A new understanding for whom? For users of sunscreen (tourists mainly and everyday people who are flushing sunscreen down their drains).
About what, in particular? About how daily practices of using sunscreen let the more harmful chemicals in the product get into the water: through showering at home and also by swimming in the ocean.
Why are these appropriate? Because we want to create an overview of how people’s choices relate to the ecosystem and the overall picture of ocean life.
What is the audience (=people who encounter your work) for the work? For (rhetoric) users of sunscreen (tourists and everyday people).
How is it specifically about development goal as articulated by the UN? UN Goals 14.2 and 14.7 concerns goals about marine coastal ecosystems as well as the effect of tourism on these ecosystems.
Post Supervision Tuesday:
WHERE? We must think of where this campaign happens and is experienced and create a speculative space, or world.
Brainstorm:
- On the beach: giving away sunscreen to feeding the corals, sunscreen that actually nourishes corals instead of damaging them.
- Create a culture around it: use a website to create a social network/ map of sunscreen users, a community.
- A traveling commercial can be utilized.
- Coral farming: learn coral farming in a summer school?
- Advertised in cosmetics shop to promote awareness.
- Install coral reef gardens in pools: feed them, care for them as for your private aquarium, and maybe that creates and incentive to also protect the oceans like your aquarium.
POSSIBILITIES
Highlighting the body as a nourishing medium, by swimming in the water with your sunscreen on you’re also enabling nourishment to the corals
Physically “feed” the corals
By now we’ve had somewhat close to a clear concept of what our product should be. And have created an overview of our concept: Feeding the corals.
Some ideas we thought of were creating a community attached to the usage of the “sunscreen-feeder”, adjusting what kind of sunscreen you need according to the sea you’re swimming in, interactive sunscreen? These were random ideas we came up with.
We also began planning how our final product should be advertised, it should be delivered and shown as a landing page (information page, community page, product page etc.)
We made an information architecture sketch of what pages will be included:
My Role:
Contributed as an individual task of finding and screenshotting pages of real websites that include landing pages, about pages, and product pages. Researched about sunscreen and different coral reefs, what they require as nourishment, what chemicals are harmful to them.
Reflection: This week I couldn’t be present in school because I was abroad fixing private matters. However in the weekend I spent time looking at different website with product landing pages that can potentially be used as inspiration. I also did some additional research on coral reefs and the ingredients of sunscreen and what it is about them that’s harmful for the reefs. This provided insight and assisted moving ahead because we will have a better grasp on perhaps targeting specific area heavy on sunscreen pollution and investigate if it’s because of a specific sunscreen that tourists are using, etc.
Journal with me! 