My final project was inspired by the generative landscape project, with the idea of a car driving down a city. However this car will be “driven” by a drunk driver, shown not only by it’s sporadic driving pattern, but the fact that it will hit and kill a person that is crashes into. A person will be crossing the street and the car will hit it, a brief “crash” will appear on screen, causing the person to disappear and a grave appearing on the bottom of the screen. The grave will display the name and age of an actual drunk driving victim. However, on the top of the screen, there will be a description of that person by someone who knew them. After the screen is filled with graves, the text box will display drunk driving facts and statistics. These statistics and information about the victims were found on various news articles and websites, as well as the website Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The setting of the landscape represents a city. The black, white, and gray colors used(except for in the crash), and the overall simplicity of the visuals is used to draw more focus on the text that shows up on the screen.

Sketches:

Link: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/638893

Screenshots:

  

Bibliography:

“U.S. Gun Deaths in 2013.” Periscopic, guns.periscopic.com/?year=2013. Accessed 10, Dec. 2018.

“Impaired Driving: Get the Facts.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 16 June 2017, www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html. Accessed 10, Dec. 2018.

“Statistics.” Mothers Against Drunk Driving, www.madd.org/statistics. Accessed 10, Dec. 2018.

“Drunk Driving Fatalities.” Foundation For Advancing Alcohol Responsibility, www.responsibility.org/get-the-facts/research/statistics/drunk-driving-fatalities/. Accessed 10, Dec. 2018.

“Nancylee Salerno.” Mothers Against Drunk Driving, 30 May 2017, www.madd.org/blog/keeping-nancylees-memory-alive/.Accessed 10, Dec. 2018.

“Damion Henderson.” Mothers Against Drunk Driving, 31 Jan. 2017, www.madd.org/blog/damion-henderson/.Accessed 10, Dec. 2018.

“The Story of Cody Dewitt.” Mothers Against Drunk Driving, 6 April 2017, www.madd.org/blog/voices-of-victims-the-story-of-cody-dewitt/. Accessed 10, Dec. 2018.

Rayman, Graham, et al. “Man with passion for dance killed after drunken driver going wrong way slams into his car in Brooklyn” New York Daily News. 12 July 2018,www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-wrong-way-driver-kills-passenger-belt-parkway-20180712-story.html. Accessed 10, Dec. 2018.

Dimon, Laura, et al. “Man fatally struck by drunk driver in Staten Island” New York Daily News. 17 June 2018, www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-staten-island-fatal-pedestrian-crash-man-killed-drunk-driver-20180617-story.html. Accessed 10, Dec. 2018.

Torres, Ella. “Designated driver who died from crash involving alleged drunk driver remembered as big brother who ‘always did the right thing'” New York Daily News. 5 Dec. 2018 www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-news-designated-driver-dies-after-collision-20181205-story.html. Accessed 10, Dec. 2018.

Thorne, Kristin. “Family of Long Island Boy Scout killed by alleged drunk driver speaks out” Eyewitness News. 3 Oct. 2018, abc7ny.com/family/family-of-boy-scout-killed-by-alleged-drunk-driver-speaks-out-/4403927/. Accessed 10, Dec. 2018.

 

 

 

I. Building from an idea I had for the generative landscape project, when the car hits a person, instead if stopping it will continue to drive. The person it hits will “die” and be replaced by a tombstone. As the car hits more people, the foreground will fill up with tombstones. If the user hover over a tombstone, a pop up will show up with data such as name, age, date of crash of a real life drunk driving victim.

This was semi-inspired by this data visualization of gun deaths and the years lost because of it.

II. This is a game/simulation of taking care of a plant. The user can give the plant, sunlight, water, or love. Once the user gives the plant enough of all three, the plant will grow into a flower. The flower that will blossom in the end is random. If the user over waters the plant or gives it too much sunlight, the plant will die. If the plant dies or fully blossoms, the user has the chance to start over. I plan on creating my own drawings of the plant and the different icons.

III. This idea is having a vine grow based on the path that your mouse is making. The longer the path is, more will grow from it. It will have samller vines branching off of it, with flowers and leaves.

 

 

 

Open Processing Link

Using the uinames API by Thom, which generates random profiles, my program displays the first names of the profiles. The color of the name presents the gender of the person and the size of the name is based on how long the name is. The program generates 10 new names every second.

At first glance, I thought the display was about U.S. politics, but on a closer inspection, it was about something different. America’s Got No Talent by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki is an interactive data visualization piece that shows the opinions of American reality TV shows (such as America’s Got Talent, The X Factor, American Idol, and more) through the lens of twitter feeds that mention the shows. It uses the time when the tweet was posted and its retweets to help create a measurement for the connection between a show’s success and it’s activity on social media. The display uses the image of the American flag as its interface, and sticks to the red, white, and blue colors. In person, there were two parts: the giant screen where the exhibit was being displayed, and a white stand which had a smaller screen where the user could interact with. The stand also labeled where on the map the user can interact with and what it will do. The display was interesting to see and play with in person. The interactive element made the data visualization fun and added an exploration aspect, from trying to see what the work ad to offer.

 

CodeProfiles is by W.Bradford Paley and made using Java. The work looks at how people might read the code by tracing it, how the programmer would interact with the code, adding notes and jumping around, and highlights where the code would be executed multiple times. The use of green colored text on the black background displays the code in a more familiar/ traditional context. Seeing the wall of code at the museum made me feel both intimidated by the numerous lines of code, but I was also fascinated by seeing it all laid out. During my coding experiences, I haven’t had many opportunities to see my code laid out in full, usually a small section that can fit onto my computer screen. But by being able to see the entire code as a whole, it made it easier to pin point where there where changes the display, such when certain lines of code light up or when lines are drawn.

The New York Times has multiple APIs that allows the user to search through its articles, movie and book reviews, best seller lists, and top stories. The times tag and semantic_api can also be used to find metadata of an article. There does not seem to be an API that looks specifically look through videos, photographs, or other forms of media, such as the the New York Times podcast. With all of the data available within the New York Times, especially since it’s a new organization, the api would be helpful in finding certain topics or articles about specific events. There is a lot of potential to use the data to represent and engage the user with what is happening in the news, especially with the current political climate. If possible, there could be an api that connects with multiple news sites and compare the articles that are written for the same event, and looks specifically at the language used in the articles.

This generative landscape shows the journey of someone driving a car recklessly(possibly DUI). This is shown through the path that the car takes, whether they are swerving, and randomly speeding up and slowing down.They move through different places, such as rural and urban areas, that each have their own risk of a car accident(more likely to hit people and/or other cars in the city). But once the car does get into a crash, the landscape stops “moving.”

This generative landscape shows the life cycle of a couple of trees, from the seeds being planted to them growing, to eventually burned in a forest fire, and then the cycle repeats. The trees will also experience weather, such as rain, snow, and wind, that will affect how fast they grow.

The generative landscape is based on the endless scrolling of Facebook. The landscape will show the different types of posts seen on Facebook and as the posts generate, each post will have different types of likes/reactions. As time passes, the posts will be more biased to a certain type of reaction, such as love or anger. As the posts become more weighted on one side, the color of the post will be reflective of the reaction it generates. For example, a post that has a lot of anger reactions will be red/orange, while a post that has a lot of love reactions will be more pink. Randomly, there will also be popup notifications from other apps that will appear on the screen.