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#SaveTheArctic

Playful political activism on social media







FINAL RESULT


‘#SaveTheArctic’ is a website containing a Tamagotchi-like avatar (a polar bear) that survives of people’s Tweets. This polar bear, who is standing on a melting ice cap in the middle of the ocean, can only be saved from drowning, if people Tweet using one of the 3 dedicated hashtags #polarbear, #polarbears or #savethearctic.

The temporal form of the design is the bearing element since the polar bear will die if the time runs out. It gives the sense of play, when an everyday Tweet suddenly works as an input for something like this. The design was also intended to create awareness on the problem of ‘Slacktivism’ – that people tend to engage politically more online than offline (in the real world). We did this through appropriating people’s ‘slacktivist’ tweets and make them be the only way the polar bear can live. However, the polar bear will die no matter what and thus the message: “Tweeting didn’t save the polar bear, what about making a real difference?” will appear. The application is constructed with the following: HTML (basic structure), CSS (background, box, font, timeline), PHP (database connection, storage of Tweets), JavaScript (timeline animation), Photoshop (animated GIF’s)

iMac-2012-save
Skærmbillede 2015-03-18 kl. 5.49.11

Skærmbillede 2015-03-18 kl. 5.50.15

Skærmbillede 2015-03-18 kl. 5.50.40




THE PROCESS

Project Prompt

Use social media to spread political or ethical ideas. The purpose is to design a way in which activism can be channeled through social media networks in a playful way. The goal is not to make pamphlets, but to make people play in a way that conveys a political message, while occupying/appropriating (their use of) social media.

Deliverables:
A description of the type of appropriation processes on social media, including a practical example/test run. The documentation should include the steps that anybody should follow to use that kind of appropriation, and screenshots of both the (political) action and the results (that is, the way people react to it).




Brainstorm

When starting the project, we found it necessary to run a thorough brainstorm. We used brainstorming as a method for producing a lot of different ideas without judgement. We all had ideas about what social medium we could use, what kind of political or ethical messages to convey, and how this could be illustrated visually. We touched upon topics like religion, news and politics on different social medias. As a next step we discussed strengths and limits of the different ideas, themes and tools, to quickly narrow down our initial amount of ideas. This brainstorm led to discussions about what kind of behaviours on the social media that we found annoying, fun or noteworthy. We ended up identifying the concept of slacktivism as a potential issue to work with.









Overview

‘#SaveTheArctic’ was developed in the class ‘Designing Digital Play’ and created along with my fellow students Justin Daneman, Casper Hamalainen, Mads Nedergaard and Jonas Haugesen at the IT University of Copenhagen in the fall of 2014.


My Contributions

  • Brainstorming
  • Sketching
  • Wireframing
  • Designing mock-ups in the browser using HTML & CSS
  • Design of avatar in Adobe Illustrator
  • Some PHP and database connection
  • Presentation of design to instructor

Wireframing

savewire

After settling on a theme and a social medium, we decided to roughly ‘sketch’ the different aspects of the design of the prototype. We realized that in order for the prototype to convey our idea the best way, we needed to make it fairly complex (the technicalities of this process is described in-depth later in this assignment). We decided that in order to get our prototype as close to the concept as possible, we would have to make smaller teams that could work on different parts simultaneously. The frontend was handled by one team that took care of the views. This included sketching and designing the layout, drawing the graphics for the specific showcase in our test setup, and working on animations and the general look of the prototype. The second team took care of the backend, and created the underlying application logics and controllers that handles updating, sharing and storing data and progress. I was on the front-end team.




First Mock-up

Skærmbillede 2015-04-26 kl. 8.28.06

The first iterations of the visual idea towards an art direction was to mimic the classic look of a Tamagotchi. This would be done with some pixel art, but was ultimately decided against since we imagined that we could do a better job appealing to our users emotionally than what we could do with pixel art. This of course meant that we could not draw directly upon the nostalgia of the Tamagotchi to help establish an emotional connection with users. We found a middle ground, giving the avatar an animation regulated by the current health level, much like the original Tamagotchis. This was done with GIF pictures, but this would probably be changed in a final version because of the lack of quality around the transparent edges of the GIF format.




Final Design

Skærmbillede 2015-03-18 kl. 5.50.40

When landing on the site a visual cue is given by the decreasing health status bar. As the player watches the site it becomes evident that the life of the polar bear is indicated by status bar and to the amount of tweets being tweeted with the hashtag ‘polarbears’. The player sees the bear’s small piece of ice melting fast and if no action is taken, the bear will drown. The user must take action, whether this action is in favor of keeping the polar bear alive and tweet to save it or stay neutral and watch it die, is up to the individual user. The user is forced to take a position based on the aesthetic cue of the avatar slowly dying. As designers we assume that the majority of users will try to save the polar bear by tweeting.



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