#10 Translation Device
Design Process
What I initially wanted to do for my assignment was collect data on the stars in the sky and possibly constellations. Unfortunately this data was not very accessible so I had to start looking for other potential ideas. After futher brainstorming I chose to look back at some of my previous work through the semester for inpiration. Reviewing my manifesto from D4tC reminded me that I wanted my work to predominately focus on confronting some foo the main issue our world cfaces today. One of those issues is the aggressive mining of natural resources. Particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo natural minerals have been mined for decades to power our technology.
My sketch explores one mining area in particular called Shinkolobwe. I wanted to monitor the effects of mining on the surrounding climate but it was difficult finding historical data sets on the area despite it's signifigance in history. Because of this I decided to to aggregate data from many different sources to try and come up with something presentable. I retrieved weather data from OpenWeather through a API dfeed, mining location data from The International Peace Information Service in CSV format, and snapshots of Shinkolobwe on the map from Google Earth.
Data Sources
Sketches
The goal was to make it easy for the user to interact with the sketch and see how the cmilate in area that is used predominately for mining has changed over the years. By hovering over different areas on the sketch or years the screenshot of the location in that particular area would be revealed. The idea is that they would reconized noicable changes in that place.
Reflection
Even though I wasn't able to get all of the data that I was initially looking for from an API, by looking at different sources and putting them all together for a meaningful message. My hope is that people will be inspired to make similar research attempts at other events or locations that have interesting histories. Looking towards the future, if we begin preserving the data that's important to us today then the possibilities for what we can do with it all in the future is vast.