Exercise 2
Beginnings
Taking into consideration some of the feedback from last week's class, I kept my idea of using RSS as the medium for my first composition, but determined that using personal feeds wasn't enough of a concept to continue working during the semester. I have begun to incorporate environmental issues into my other studio work - climate change and accelerated extinction specifically - and so I decided to focus on that zone of emergency in this class as well.
I was interested in how RSS can act as a sort of nervous system of information, allowing you to monitor several different situations from the same interface. I wondered if I could depict certain statistics from the environmental movement in a different way, and give them more impact because of the temporal nature of RSS. Its one thing to be told a species goes extinct every 20 minutes, and quite another to actually see a new element appear in a feed each time a species goes extinct. I hoped that it would make a very abstract idea much more tangible, which is another theme of my graphic design work.
Interesting/funny precedents for this idea:
Is it Christmas? – A site that delivers an answer (NO) daily until it is, in fact, Christmas. Part of a wider trend for:
Single Serving Sites – A collection of the current web appetite for sites that do one thing really, really well. Or just really, really consistently.
The feed
The RSS.
Thoughts
As I created this little widget over the past week, I struggled with a few things. The first, surprisingly, was my attempt to find statistics that fit this model of "every x minutes, y happens." It was a classic lesson of creating the tool and then trying to fit the data into it even when it doesn't want to go.
In trying to do this, I came up against the ethical boundaries of using statistics, something that I think is a major issue. I was aware that there were many instances where a news source or website had taken aggregate yearly data and decided to create a more compelling story by dividing it by 12 or 365 to create more bite-sized figure for the public to understand. I didn't want to do the same thing, and so I became much more stringent in my search for valid stats. It made it hard to come up with the volume I wanted.
I also questioned the tone of my exploration. I was heavily influenced by a concurrent project that dealt with delivering a message using hope vs fear, and I found that beating people over the head with hourly reminders of the dismal state of the world wasn't the way to use RSS to activate an audience.