#ctec503

Finished putting all the pieces of the jeans together today. Here is what they look like against a wall and an explanation of each section.

It’s quick janky and I’m not entirely happy with the edges. Something I was surprised by was how the hanging jeans seemingly slowly rotate. Although I didn’t anticipate this, it gives an eye catching movement that might just draw people in. The fact that there is a sliced up pair of jeans hovering and turning should be a good tool to get people curious. It’s similar to my last project, I drew a poster of a big frog in a pot on a cellphone. It did relate to the project, but more importantly it was so bizarre that people wanted to come closer and see what it was about, I hope the ghost jeans will produce the same effect. 

We had a few people come in at pluck through the rack of clothes. A 2nd year came and without any prompt starting saying how this is making her think about how she owns too many clothes and how the stories add value to the items. We then told her how accurate she was with her description. This was a great sign, to have someone come up and very elegantly tell us what our project is about means that it is simple and self explanatory to some degree. Tomorrow we will get to test this further with the “test for a treat” event. 

Moving forward we are discussing how we want to present for showcase and ways we can collect data on the night in a fun and interactive way. My hope is to prototype and idea tomorrow at the event where we get people to draw a piece of clothing that is meaningful to them and write the short companion story beside it. Roxy and I agreed that this might be quite effective if by the end of the night we had a big tapestry of people unique doodles and handwritten stories. Again, this is similar to our last project. We had a table top piece of paper where people could mark their personal “line” in terms of how much data they are willing to freely give away.

 I've been reading a series of articles and scholar papers regarding the vast issue of fast fashion but more specifically its environmental impact. The key environmental harms include water pollution, toxic chemicals and textile waste. My question here is what avenue should I be researching. Identifying what caused fast fashion in the first place seems a good place to start. The mass production of cheap clothing has accelerated over the past decade as big-name stores compete to stock the latest trends. With no escape from the fast-changing styles, seasons and colours consumers reflect these fast changes as high spenders and increasing demand.  This article written by Nikki Gilliland covers this and claims the 'industry has grown 21% over the past three years'. It also claims that 'H&M and Zara were said to be among the very first fashion retailers doing this'.

https://econsultancy.com/four-factors-fuelling-the-growth-of-fast-fashion-retailers/ 

There are roughly 100 billion pieces of clothing made in a year, for 7 billion people. Most end up in landfills. Some man-made fabrics such as nylon and polyester can stay on our planet longer than we will, and longer than our children will. The issue is, we buy things we don't need or we buy things because its cheap. Breaking this mentality seems like the obvious solution here. However, easy to encourage that while turning our backs to the stupid cycle we are brainwashed into.

Through conversations today we were able to break down and identify the three issues/areas of fast fashion. Environmental - water wastage, chemical exposure. Ethics - disturbing livelihood of workers behind the garments. Social - Installing change to mindsets around consumerism. We understand that taking an approach that covers all three of these areas is daunting. At this stage, I figure that the only hopeful fate to this unsustainable problem is consumer awareness of the lifecycle of these garments.

Conventionally grown cotton, one of the most popular clothing fibres, is also one of the most water- and pesticide-dependent crops.  It takes 2,700 litres of water to make one cotton shirt, enough to meet the average person’s drinking needs for two-and-a-half years. Statistics like these need to be communicated. Today Ella brought up a valid point explains the negative impact of making people feel bad and guilty for their clothes, as the message won't be effective. We need to be aware of pop this as we begin to ideate further.  

[ Collaboratively written with Ravenne ]

Continuing on with the creation of the interactive garment, Donna provided us with scraps of multiple types of conductive fabric that she had lying around. 

Ravenne and I began to place the patches down on the shirt. We initially had planned for the whole garment to be conductive, however, with the material we had, we had to resort to only having the front of the shirt be conductive. We went through the process of sticking iron-on strips onto each patch and sticking it onto the shirt itself. We wanted to keep the pattern very patchy and linear to ensure it would look good and fitting next to the first garment that Gio had made.

To ensure that all the patches were conductive, Ravenne and I connected each patch by sewing conductive thread between them.

Showing off the pretty much final artefact. Just touch ups to be done for assignment, and Showcase. Hooray! :)

The UV/glow in the dark aspects closeup.

We realised after reflecting that the jury need more of a role to play in the game otherwise it continues to be a judge and defendant game where the others observe. That and we also needed to add something that could further add or twist the defendants story, almost like a make or break plot-twist. So, we added characteristic/trait cards that would be randomly picked and revealed after the defendant has made their case.

Examples of characteristics/traits would be:

-  Donates to charity

- Pothead

- Owns a lot of dogs 

- Gambling addiction

These character/trait cards can be both helpful or dramatically unhelpful to the defendant. It could further them towards innocence or lead them straight to being guilty. After the card is revealed, then the jury would continue to interrogate. 

We also continued to make some minor changes to balance the game out:

- Added time limit to create tension, so when the location, object and crime cards are revealed, then the judge had 1 minute to come up with a story where the defendant is convicted of a crime where he was found with an object at a specified location. Then the defendant has 1 minute to create a case, where they need to convinced both the judge and the jury that they are innocent, then after that, the characteristic/trait card is revealed and then the jury can interrogate for 2 and a half minutes. We messed around with time limits, making it shorter and longer and found that having the time too short was too stressful and high pressure, which would always lead to the defendant being not guilty, not giving them a fair chance. Then when the time limit was too long, then the defendants cases always tends to fall apart and always lead to them being guilty. 

- Cultural aspect to the game play where the defendants would act out the characteristic/trait cards which is something that we never expected to happen, but adds something to the game. 

- The judge needs to be more specific when creating the crime, instead of just reading out the words on the cards, for example for the crime, ‘Credit card scammer’ instead of just saying “you were convicted of credit card scamming”, they would say, “not only were you convicted of credit card scamming, but there were 10 credit cards that were found on your person that do not belong to you”.

- Taking out any cards that didn’t work while play-testing, like: ‘selling food without its use by date’, University lecture hall’, ‘keying a police car’, ‘Going 45km/h in a 40km/h school zone’, ‘jay walking’, ‘Recording Booth’ and ‘selling lithium bath bombs’. Some of these cards we and thought would do well, but after play-testing, we saw that some of the cards didn't get a reaction or that some of the cards didn’t really add anything to the narrative.

24/08/18

This week started out a bit slow for me. I felt uninspired and a bit confused as to what we were being asked to do. I was continuing on with the domestic violence data from last week, trying to make more prototypes, but I wasn’t particularly interested in the data so that led to a lack of productivity. 

Erin had been researching space junk and I found myself really intrigued. I personally have never heard much about this issue and I’ve noticed it’s never really in the news nor is it an issue that people actively discuss. The gist of it is is that there is an increasing amount of space junk orbiting Earth, particularly in the Lower Earth Orbit. Not only can these pieces of space junk collide with satellites, causing a lot of monetary damage, they also collide with each other, separating into even more pieces, exponentially increasing the amount of space junk in orbit. The Lower Earth Orbit is becoming extremely crowded with space debris, making it increasingly difficult to organise safe launches. I think it’s a really important and relevant issue for everyone as it is going to jeopardise space travel for future generations.

Project Circuit-Tree

-- * Systems Experienced Summative Post *

-- Production of circuitry cards

-- Connection methods trialling

-- Conditions to make feasible circuitry cards

-- Prototype Thundercloud

-- Prototype Blue Fish