Realizations

Last week, after trying to learn to use a little but of three.js, I met with Professor with yet another changed idea for my interactive project. Throughout the week, I realized that doing a web project might be better for me in terms of contributing to career preparedness since honing web development was where I left off over the summer before school started.

Professor told me to be wary about just painting a caricature of people; which I realized could definitely happen with what I was thinking. It may even propagate multiple stereotypes that are unhealthy. Most of this can be found in the interactive part of the project (screen 2 in image above)

Moving forward, the idea of simply making it an educational platform about the SDGs occurred to me. Therefore, I am keeping the 1st and 3rd screen similar.

Further into the week after a little bit more research and more feelings of helplessness I realized that my helpless feelings sometimes come from the feeling of not being able to do anything mostly because I always think I have to do something big to help. However, doing more research on the SDGs, I found people shedding light into the parts of it that were not sustainable at all as can be seen in the article here.

This led me to think of an approach that was more about showing the dark side of the SDGs or what happens when we fail terribly.

Past lessons

Lessons from past mentors/bosses/parents reminded me that little things counted as well. Even lessons from my past self where, as a 10 year old, I encouraged friedns to make cards and friendship bracelets to give to others to spread awwareness of global warming. People always tell me that little things count because I’m always afraid I’m never doing enough or that I’m doing nothing at all. This led me to consider populating each SDG category with resources of smaller wways people can make an impact.

Conversations

Upon conversing with my mom about this idea, she highlighted the fact that this idea was more of a bottoms up approach than the typical top down approach and how it wwas a good way to approach these goals. She also asked me how I’d pick which goals to focus on when I said I might just do a few ones.

Realizations

Given my realizations on what I could do with the SDGs, I knew that instead of reiterating what was already at the UN site, I wanted instead to either highlight smaller ways people can or have helped; whether it be projects or businesses (I will be conducting some interviews for this to feature people and small ways they have helped). The laternative would be more of a satire showing us how the world ends when we fail each SDG.

And according to many observations and studies on happiness it’s the little things that count. This project is an attempt to lay out a call to action that begins by building a foundation rather than starting from a place that is difficult to reach for many people like students like me.

Lo-Fi

Below is my idea for the main homepage with the goals, and the next page for resources and other pieces of information.

Below is a different idea focused more on the dark side of things; for this I played around with a toggle that switched between the “light” and “dark” side; where the dark side is us failing miserably at achieving the goals we set.