Welcome to my very last blog post of Grade 8!

 

This year has definitely brought on the most changes in my life. From starting High school, to doing all my work online and staying at home all day. Our final project was based on the UN sustainable goals, and what they are trying to accomplish. This project is what we call a blue-sky project, meaning we are in charge of our own project/product, and what we want to learn and accomplish. At the end of this project we would be having an exhibition, where we showcase our work.

When we started our project, the Exhibition was a big unknown. In the previous years it has always been in person where you can interact with the attendees and help them gain a better understanding. Since we weren’t allowed to see anyone at that point, our teachers were trying to figure out a way to make this work in the best possible way.

To start off we had to find topics we were interested in, we would look into a few sustainable goals that caught our interest from the start. I decided to look more into goal 12, responsible consumption and production. I was really interested in the consumption half, and how people today are ordering more things online than ever. I had to connect this problem to COVID-19 so I could use it as my project. This was actually easier than I thought it would be, during our time in quarantine people have been ordering more supplies online, a lot of which is not necessary.  So already I had the base of my problem I wanted to find answers to.

 

As well as creating our own projects we were put into groups for the final exhibition. The people who were in your group had similar projects or ones that were trying to solve a similar problem. In this group we had to come up with a similar theme between our projects. You would think would be easy considering all our projects were based on the same thing, but a lot of our group had projects based on different things. We ended up doing a more creative theme, which was, time traveling. To make our presentation interactive, we wanted to allow the audience to choose how the presentation went. Based on what option they chose we would either do one presentation or another. We told them they got to chose how the future would end, their choices would be the main idea of each of our projects, if the chose one main idea over the other, the person with that project would present.

I think coming up with a collective theme and something that could tie all our projects was actually one of the hardest parts. Which also made it the nicest to complete!

Before all of this though I had to come up with my project. As I mentioned before I already had the base for what I wanted my project to be on. The driving question I made for my self was, What drives people to consume so much and waste so much of what they buy? With that question I started to do more research, once I had a little more information I created my How Might We question, How might we influence people to change how the consume products? That was when I really started to develop my project and an idea of what I was going to present. My product had to somehow be an answer or a solution to that question.

 

I was really stuck for a long time, I just kept doing more and more research. Eventually I decided to do an idea dump. I just wrote everything down that came to me, some things were repeated some thing weren’t that helpful but I started to narrow everything down. I really like the idea of music or images effecting peoples emotions, so I did a lot of brainstorming there. In the end I came up with the idea of an advertisement. Down below is my idea dump,

 

Once I knew what I wanted to create I did some research and the effect of adds and how to add a photo that will effect peoples emotions. Then I got into making my prototypes!

 

This was my first draft, I had a rough idea of what I wanted for the layout and i added and image. The image I added was meant to look like the earth was being buried by boxes, and make you feel sad maybe even angry. As you can see it did not work at all, I did not get what I was going for.

My second draft was an improvement, I liked that it was an actual photo. I think photos hold more power and emotion in them. In this photo people are dancing in smoke caused by pollution. A lot of pollution is caused by factories producing the product you order online, or by how they get transported to you. My idea was for this ad to pop up before you place an order on a product, making you thing twice about the necessity of what you’re buying.

 

This was my last draft. I felt this image was more powerful as people often sympathize a lot in animals. I like the layout of this one and the colours were good.

 

Once I had completed my project I only had my pitch to come up with. My pitch was how I was going to present it. Like before I did a smaller more organized Idea dump,

This just gave me a rough idea on what to say, it was the main points and ideas to my project.

 

During this project I really learned how to collect my ideas when they are all different and jumbled in my head. This is a really useful skill that will be helpful in projects going forward. It was really interesting to have to complete this online and at home, it was a learning experience I would have normally not had.

 

“It cannot be right to manufacture billions of objects that are used for a matter of minutes, and then are with us for centuries.”

– Roz Savage