Overview
As students, graduation from university can be challenging, considering that life is changing when you start to live by yourself and try to come up with convenient daily decisions. Whether deciding on taking a shower, going outside, or choosing whether get take out or cook dinner, most of our small daily decisions impact the carbon footprint, the produced waste, and the environment. The interest in learning these issues is minimal, resulting in not knowing the consequences of our decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to offer information engagingly to help people navigate their options in day-to-day life and make conscious decisions. However, this experience must mitigate the conflict where the interactor feels like they are being controlled. Therefore, an experience emphasizing narrativity should be provided to ensure each individual's personal experience with real-life scenarios.
Design Process
We conducted a brainstorming session to designate the final topic. We realized that sustainability is a general topic that might not be feasible for this project. Therefore, it was agreed to focus on an individual’s sustainable decision-making and, consequently, their carbon footprints as a topic. Based on this topic, discussions were made on the interactivity and the narrativity features of this experience. Narrative texts were written after creating a wireframe of the prototype using Miro. Finally, Figma was used to create the prototype.
Prototype
Interaction with the story was made through a perspectivizing character, Ezra or Blake, to facilitate cognitive identification. The interactor adopts the character's goal and point of view regardless of their interests. This was strengthened by a deictic shift through an intradiegetic narrator and linguistic cues. Throughout the interactive experience, the prototype provided apparent results immediately by displaying the consequence or feedback of that selection. This was visualized through a meter with three levels, green, yellow, or red, to represent the significance of each choice and how it affects the environment. At the end of the day, the prototype provides information regarding the options that were not chosen and their environmental consequences, along with the final color of the visualized meter.
The prototyped website experience is structured around a coherent series of relatively small occurrences in several locations with chronological order reflecting the impact of all daily decisions. To ensure immersion and evoke mental imagery, the story provides a concrete language with imagery of the protagonist's surroundings. The narrative provided a large set of realistic decisions for each scenario to reduce the feeling of being pushed to choose one specific option and to increase the perceived agency and verisimilitude. It allows various decisions and provides information about the environmental consequences, how to take sustainable action, and reduce waste. By describing the results of good and bad decisions, the impact of having a high carbon footprint and the consequences of creating too much waste is presented throughout.
