DMD KickOff Week: Day 2 - Anthropogenic Design Workshop

During Julian's workshop on Anthropogenic Design, three sub-themes were touched on:

• Critical, Speculative and Open Design
• Expanded Interface Design
• Bringing the backend forward

We spoke about environmental problems how using our phones to search a webpage on Google can create a negative impact on the environment. It was explained that every time we search or continue to keep a tab open, this uses a Google Server which produces a large amount of heat and high electricity usage. We discussed where phone materials are sourced and how employees are poorly treated in other countries collecting these minerals.

We brainstormed phone sensors and environmental/social issues and how we could combine these two factors to make a phone app to solve problems. Using Open data we discovered the amount of pollution in Central London was very high and wanted to decrease humans exposure to air pollution by diverting them through back roads/footpaths instead of using the pavements near main roads. This would be achieved using an app. We correlated that high amounts of traffic caused high amounts of air pollution in an area due to the vehicles being still. Therefore using a map, an individual would be able to detect this and use a different walking route.

We spoke about the different API's that can be used in an app and we thought Google Maps or a mapping API would be the most useful for our app.

We drew our ideas using paper-based wireframes.


We touched on using my balsamiq and Invision to prototype apps.
I received a stamp in my passport for attending this workshop