S P E C I A L  T O P I C S : B I O T E C H + D E S I G N

This is a blog in response to the project proposal assignment for earth day. On Thursday we were prompted to theorize a project in response to Earth day and what that means in our new technology heavy environments. Our project was very much in the conceptual stages, we were posing questions and suggesting projects that inspired us. We concluded that the most impactful project would be one that is educational and simple.

During Thursday's class, Iman Person, Shreya Neogi, and I discussed Earth Day and what artists are doing around the world to commemorate its 50th anniversary. After we learned that this year also marks the 20th anniversary of the International Space Station, we stumbled across a NASA campaign dubbed "Picture Earth" that is designed to foster creativity and promote a sense of "togetherness at a distance".

            In this blog, I want to first address something that has been on my mind in the last few weeks and has recently become more and more exacerbated over the past couple days. News media outlets that I follow such as Bloomberg, Businessweek, Business Insider, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, CNN, CNBC, etc. have all posted about how radically different cities and streets in some of the world's largest metropolitan areas have looked during this pandemic.

On Thursday, I presented a website that allows people to easily measure their personal ecological footprint.

Link to the website: http://www.footprintcalculator.org/ 

This blog is a response to the research that was done during our class time on Thursday, April 16th, 2020. Our research was directed towards the Coronavirus pandemic, and we wanted to brainstorm ideas on creating data visualization projects related to the Coronavirus. Currently, news sites such as The New York Times have created data visualization maps that are alarming, and cause the public a sense of anxiety and panic with no hope.

Since I am focusing on the coronavirus for my blog postings, the blog post written by Lucas caught my eyes. The pollution becomes severe because of face masks that have been used frequently these days. Not only doctors, or nurses but also people begin to use face masks to protect themselves from infecting by the coronavirus.

As we discussed “pollution” in the class, we can link this topic with coronavirus as positive environmental changes are beginning to show these days. As a number of industrial companies are shut down, the air quality of the world gets better as the clear sky can be seen from the satellite.

Especially, there is one report related to the European continent that nitrogen dioxide levels in Europe become lowered. As the images are shown below, NO2 emission (the red part of the map) is shown less in April 2020 compared to 2019.

Since the coronavirus many of us went under a lock down and under a stay- home policy. A lot of stores, factories, and shops closed down and forced the people to just stay home. Many of the industrial activity has been shut down in many part of the world especially places like in China or Europe. 

Due to the coronavirus there has been some positive affects to the environment.  As I mentioned above, the lack of industrial activity in China has helped the air pollution to drop significantly. 

After watching the recorded videos I wanted to respond to some of the presentations that I thought were really interesting! I especially found what Ariana shared with us was really interesting on the ecological footprint and how it shows the percentage of your carbon footprint and the CO2 emissions and how it gives you the option to explore the solutions and see the map and the graph of the world. I also thought the video about transforming the carbon emission to ink was very cool. All of the presentations were so interesting like the two artist that were mentioned in the beginning.

Designed by Dutch company Studio Roosegaard, the Smog Free Tower is a 7 m tall and 3.5 m thick outdoor air purifier. It was presented as a potential solution to air pollution in urban spaces and brought to life via a Kickstarter campaign in September 2015.

When it comes to Covid-19 and its effect on pollution, one of the most noticeable factors all over the world has been the decrease in emissions and the visible effect on the quality of the air. However, this doesn't mean that any problems have been solved regarding pollution, and there are many other unseen side effects of the virus regarding waste.

            I came across an advertisement today and it reminded me about our discussion of pencils, therefore I wanted to expand upon the Tuesday blog posting I originally made regarding this topic. The ad was a sponsored post on Instagram by the agency Ogilvy and Mather that promoted Faber-Castell's, a stationary supply store, top of the line artist pencils.

Through this quarantine, I have noticed that the idea of humanity taking a break and shutting off is not okay for some. Of course, there is the reason as jobs are no longer available, resources are being hoarded, and there is the everlasting fear of this virus. To me, this is a chance for us to take a breath and just stop. It allows us to think about what our lives consisted of and now what it has become. It makes us truly think about what is important and what is truly necessary. The most important thing to me right now is thinking about our place on this planet.

First: I found a website that shows global air quality in real time.