Precious plastics is a design project started by Dave Hakkens which focuses on providing people with tools to recycle. In order to

provide people with these tools Hakkens shares all the blueprints for the necessary machines in order to get started.  The machines generally work to break down old and reusable plastics, like bottles and kitchenware, into small components that can be poured or placed into a mold in order to be made into something else.  Two slow design principles that Precious Plastics embody are the principles of reveal and expand.  They show people that things that are thought of to be trash and that no longer have use can be remade into a completely new item or can be broken down into material to make something else.  People often think of recycling as just putting items into a blue bin, but they do not often think about how else they can help in the process. Also by making the designs open source, he encourages other to participate in this movement that he is creating.  

Mermaids Hate Plastic, Benjamin Von Wong 

             What Wong’s main goal was to raise awareness to the plastic pollution in the sea as a result of the overuse of plastic and the unreliable methods of disposal for these plastics.  One of the main contributors to this is plastic bottles and a big consequence are artificial islands that are composed of these plastic bottles that in turn disrupt the delicate ecosystems of the ocean.  In these series of photographs, Wong portrays a lone figure in a sea of plastic water bottles.  The mermaid is essentially a fish out of water due to the hostile takeover of the water bottles.  This piece helps people reflect and expand as it takes an ordinary, everyday item and turns it into something that is deadly, something that people would not expect to be the end result of their usage.   

Fantasy Projects

              One of the projects that I had in mind was a heat map of sorts that reacts to where people spend most of their time in a certain place.  An example could be at a university to see where people spend most of their time.  Obviously on a large campus like UIC people tend to move around either to get to class or to a location to study or take a break.  It would be cool to see a map of some sorts that displays the differences in the amount of time people spend at a certain location compared to others.  

            For example, in one variation, color differentiates the amount of people that are at a certain location, the concentration of people that a one place has at any given time.  It can also be visually portrayed through the use of different sizes of shapes.  A smaller circle means less time spent at a location, compared to a large circle which represents a long period of time spend at any place.  On of my inspiration for this is something called an iographica.  Iographica is an application that tracks the movements of a mouse and through similar ramification, creates an image based on the mouse movements over any period of time. Sometimes the results can look like a jumble of webs. And others times they can look like a constellation.  

         An alternative to this can be an app that performs a similar function to iographica, but instead of mouse movements, tracks the movements of the user either physically, or how much time that person spends on any given time on a specific app and what their general screen touches interactions look like.  Apps can be color coded.  And larger circle can represent the equivalency to holding a button and small dots and lines can represent quick swipes.  In a way this can help people perceive what we are personally putting our times towards, instead of a memory or series of memories of where we’ve been or what we were doing on our phones, we can get a visual representation of what we are spending our time on.  

                   Another idea that I had was that there could be a display or app that people can interact would.  The display would first take a picture of the user, then the user would input different information like how much they eat, how often they exercise, how much they sleep, etc.  and would then display a projected image of what the user would look like in 10, 20, 30 etc. years.  This would require a lot of coding to be able to take into account all these variables, but to see people react to what they could look like in the future would be a cool idea.  Obviously it is very limited as people do not do the same thing everyday, for any number of decades which is where the problem would arise.  

                  I feel many people tend to think about the immediate reward of many decisions that they make, but not about how it can affect them in the future.  In this case it would only show the physical and not mental strain that it would have on a person.  It might motivate people to change their habits in order to prevent any unwanted change besides obvious aging.