Background Story
In the year 2550 humans have evolved, the planet has undergone hundreds of cycles of change, and technology is completely integrated in all areas of daily life. To live without technology is not imaginable for those living during this time. Resources for survival and operations of all magnitudes use technology by utilizing robotics capable of intelligent interactions. It is routine for research teams to explore areas of the world previously abandoned for various reasons and on an excursion to one of these areas an artifact is found.
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The artifact in this example resembles a flat piece of plastic, but contains engraved lettering in a foreign language on its surface. As a researcher you naturally store this artifact for testing back in the lab where an advanced device can tell you what it is. After scanning, it’s discovered that the thin item contains data in an ancient format no longer used. The purpose of the device appears to be to store and retrieve information about the user. The old technology may need to be converted into a newer form in order to become visible to the user. When activated, an interactive menu appears that allows you to explore the experiences and records of that person. The menu is organized by year and event, allowing the viewer to pick specific sections to view if they so choose. The main experiences, memories and records visible on the device include those related to climate change and the impact on this particular person’s life. We specifically chose to incorporate the period of time with the failure of passing the Green New Deal and showing the users a glimpse into the life of what the characters were experiencing during the decades leading up to total Earth evacuation.
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The artifact serves the purpose of spreading awareness and showing people of the future what life was like in 2050. The awareness being spread will be for climate change and its negative impacts in our society today, as shown through one person’s life. This will show the people of the future how small negative impacts can turn into something bigger. If climate change is still an issue in the year 2550, then possibly the artifact can serve as a useful tool. Through this interactive game, it was our goal to imagine a world in which human activity destroys the Earth. A world in which we have no other option but to colonize Mars.
Final Description
The artifact for our project resembles a fairly flat piece of plastic, but contains engraved coding in the form of an NFC sticker on its surface. The player, as a researcher, stores this artifact for testing back in the lab where an advanced device can tell them what it is. After scanning, it’s discovered that the thin item contains data in an ancient format no longer used. The purpose of the device appears to be to store and retrieve information about the user. The old technology may need to be converted into a newer form in order to become visible to the user. When activated, an interactive menu appears that allows the viewer to explore the experiences and records of that person. The menu is organized by year and event, allowing the viewer to pick specific sections to view if they so choose. The main experiences, memories and records visible on the device include those related to climate change and the impact on this particular person’s life.
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The artifact serves the purpose of spreading awareness and showing people of the future what life was like in 2050. The awareness being spread is for climate change and its negative impacts in our society today, as shown through the lives of five different people. Each person experienced a different aspect of climate change and had to modify how they lived in order to adapt to the changes. This artifact will show the people of the future how small negative impacts can turn into something bigger. People who view our artifact may take the goals of the Green New Deal into better consideration to work to prevent climate disasters from happening. Such as the events that each of the people whose lives are embedded into the flat pieces of plastic experienced. If climate change is still an issue in the year 2550, then possibly the artifact can serve as a useful tool.
Interaction Instructions
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​Precondition: Download the following apps to read from the card
- Apple iPhone: Download "Decoder - NFC Scanner" here.
- Android: Download "NFC Tasks" here.
- Enable NFC for your device here​
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Press the ejection button to receive a card.
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Open the application on your device downloaded during the precondition steps.
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Touch your device to the NFC sticker located in the center of the card.
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A webpage will open with a red button in the center, click "Run Now".
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Follow the instructions from each card’s twinery story to maneuver through the character’s life.
Using the Card
Changes Made:
Our original story idea was to create a storyline where society is now living on Mars. Researchers come back to Earth from Mars to discover the effects of climate change and come across an abandoned place that contains cards with information about people’s lives on them. Originally we were just going to have the researchers review one card, but changed it to five cards (one for each of our group members).
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From there we changed the storyline on each character’s card a few times to better reflect climate impacts and further develop each character. After we finalized our storyline and project plan, we worked to create the cards themselves. We started out with a thin piece of plastic that had a spot for the NFC sticker to be placed in. The first design was a little thin, causing the card to bend. From there we slightly changed the card to be thicker and have a chip on the back to improve the overall look and design. Throughout the process we didn’t scrap anything, but did add the chip to the back of the cards since our last update. We never really had to change the background either. We developed a pretty thorough background and storyline to go off of. From the start we made sure to create a futuristic background that touched on topics of climate change. We did change the individual character’s stories a bit throughout the designing process, but kept to the background story we originally came up with.
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Other changes we made along the way included creating a place of storage for the cards and clarifying the use of the NFC stickers. We felt that each individual card needed to have some sort of storage in which they were found back on Earth. Ian used a mirror and a dvd player to create a structure that stores and discards each card to the player. As for the NFC stickers, many people found the process confusing when we presented our project to the class. To fix this confusion we created a flowchart on our website that explains how to use the NFC sticker to play the game. People with iPhones will have to download an NFC reading app, but from there they simply have to scan the NFC sticker with their phone, and it will take them to the twinery linked to that character’s card. Since “prototyping” we have not made any changes to our background or storyline. We felt that the storyline we have does a good job of touching on everything we wanted to portray. We did slightly modify the card design though. Ian found some electronic chips at home and added it to the back of the cards to improve the visuals of the card. We also didn’t scrap anything or have any big challenges since “prototyping”. The only other thing we added to our project based off of the feedback from the class was to make sure the climate change topics were clear. Each group member made sure that their character’s story clearly presented possible impacts of climate change, as well as found climate related pictures to go along with their stories.
Goals & Relation to Climate Change
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Each character experiences a different climate related disaster.
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The player maneuvers through the character’s life in relation to the climate change effects they experience and life decisions.
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A goal is to spark people to realize how fatal climate change can be if proper actions are not taken now.
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Influence people to work toward the goals lined out in the Green New Deal
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Our future could look similar to that of the people we created to be linked to each plastic card. The goal of this project is to show people how quickly things could turn for the worst if the Earth is not properly taken care of. We hope that by showing people this, then more people will care and want to influence change in a positive direction.
Team Reflections
Fer Reflection:
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I think this project is going really well. Thinking back to the start of the quarter, we didn't really know where we wanted to go with our story. However, as the quarter went on, we started making changes to our ideas and making them better. Such as making the change so that each team member had their own character and their own NFC sticker so that players could see the lives of different characters and get different perspectives. I think we have all contributed to this project especially since everyone has their own character to work on. Some of us focus on the organization and communication of the project while others are focused more on the techy side. Regardless, I believe we make a good team and everyone has something special and creative to bring to the table. I enjoyed being able to come up with my own character and have to write her Twine Story because it pushed me out of my comfort zone and into a little bit more of the techy side of this project. It has also been really interesting thinking about the future and what climate change can do to our Earth. It worries me that a lot of people don’t see what really is happening and so I am happy that this project allowed me to research and think of the possibilities of what our Earth could be facing, and ways I could do my part to help. Overall, the design of the website and the player cards are pretty cool and Ian was able to find a really cool mirror to make part of our artifact storage.
Sammy Reflection:
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This project was super engaging and fun. We were given a lot of examples and guidelines from the get go but also given a lot of creative freedom as to what we could do for our game. The idea of it being an invention in the future discovered by someone 500 years from now made it challenging and exciting to try and come up with different ideas. As a group we had a lot of fun bouncing ideas off of each other. As far as individual contribution i just tried to pull my own weight and stay on schedule with the rest of the team. Some of the problems we ran into were actually figuring out how to use the twinery and connect it to our website and the NFC chip. (thank goodness we had Ian guiding us with the technology). Another issue that came up was figuring out which phones could be compatible with NFC chips and which apps we would need to download in order for each person in the class to be able to play the game. Another hurdle we needed to figure out was how we were going to form our stories, did we want to do first person? Third person? Diary entry style? In the end we were all on the same page and once we smoothed out those bumps it was pretty straight forward from there. Additionally we needed to figure out the format to which we were going to lay out the game and come up with the back story. In my a this was the most fun because we were able to imagine the digital graveyard and had a few different iterations. At first we were gonna have a built out database of this person's life but then we realized that takes the game aspect out of it so we made it a text interactive based game. So, net net we had a few different versions of how we were going to lay out the game and we had a few different ideas about how we were going to incorporate the physical aspect (i.e NFC chip vs QR codes vs a 3D book via website), we then had to figure out the layout and the backstory and also figure out our own individual characters. I ended up creating Sloane Marie, a 37 year old CEO from Los Angeles. There was a significant amount of team work required in which i believe we executed well. And i think our end project turned out pretty good!
Damola Reflection:
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I loved working on this project with my group members. I like how we have no idea what we wanted to do at first, then the quarter progressed more and slowly we started coming up an idea. Each person brings amazing ideas to the table and has great creativity. We were fascinated with the idea of leaving Earth then coming back to it, to see what remained or if it was even habitable again. The beginning stages of the project was difficult especially when creating a story because so many ideas were in place. It started out with just one character, but then later changed to multiple so that people could learn more about the situation from different perspectives. This provided everyone an equal chance to contribute and develop their own storyline for their character in twinery. Everyone contributed evenly, the workload wasn’t put on to any individual person. I'm glad we came up with the idea of having the NFC stickers because it brings a new form of interactivity for the players. Issue regarding the NFC stickers came up but we fixed that by finding an app that is compatible all iphones. When it came to the creation of the card itself our first try wasn't what we expected, the measurements were off and the material wasn’t good. It’s fine because we learned from our prototype and improved it by changing the measurements to fit the NFC sticker correctly, making the material bigger and more durable so it wouldn't break easily and making each card a different color to add diversity. In each twine story the character faces a situation that is related to climate change based on the location of them. Each member added more details in their twine story so that players can really feel as if they are there with the character and feel for them. I love the way the our website is because it adds a specific design to it that puts you in the shoes of the topic, it has so much detail in it. I loved working on this project and couldn't ask for a better team.
Sienna Reflection:
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So far our project has gone really well and ran smoothly. We started out with the small idea of people coming back to Earth from Mars, and were able to grow that idea into the dynamic storyline and project that we have now created. As a group we all did a great job of creating a storyline and project idea. At first we were only going to have one character, but changed it so that each team member had a character to work on. This has allowed us to all have a substantial contribution to the group project because we were all responsible for creating the storyline, twinery and details of our characters. We have also split up working on the different write ups and summaries that we had to do. More technologically advanced group members helped out with the tech side of things, whereas the rest of us worked more on the facilitation of the project. We has a slight issue of the NFC sticker not being able to be read by iPhones, but quickly fixed that by downloading an NFC reader app onto our phones. Other than that we haven’t really run into any issues, we have simply just encountered some modifications and changes that we needed to make in order to make our final project better. For instance, we changed the look of the cards containing the NFC sticker to be more substantial and better fit the look we were going for. We also modified our backstory and individual character’s stories to be more dynamic. I think that through this project we have been able to portray the possible impacts of climate change really well. Each character we have created encounters a climate-related disaster that affects the way they have to live, and eventually determines whether or not they survive. I am also really happy with how the design of our website and card have turned out. We kind of added on to the design as we went through the process of creating the final project, but it has all come together very well.
Ian Reflection:
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Throughout the project I discovered new interests and found ways to incorporate current ones. Learning about the Green New Deal has engaged me in discussions about how important it is to educate myself on the subject. Specifically, while writing the story for my character Gabriel Wallace - I felt compelled to learn more about nations outsides the United States and what their struggle is like. I learned that we have a negative reputation currently because our political intelligence is lacking. The artifact itself is a speculation on how our current information sharing habits could evolve. It seems that generations continue to improve and expand ways of discourse which influences our culture. It is clear to me that the Green New Deal needs to not only influence our technology but also our culture.
