There is No Planet B

Design Process

For my anti-surveillance tool, I wanted to relay an urgent and important message. I chose climate change as my topic because of the “Doomsday Clock” that was installed in Union Square during climate week. My initial plan was to create a sketch that is targeted to those who care about climate change, and to urge them to take further action. I wanted to put the countdown clock as the center of my sketch, along with the marine life in the background. The secret message would only show when you clicked on the clock, and along with the message that becomes apparent, the background would turn into a life-less sea using dull colors. While getting feedback during the lab session, Elena suggested that I create a message in disguise instead. Instead of the people who believe in climate change as the recipient, those who did not believe in climate change would become the recipient. I thought this was a brilliant idea, and changed my initial plan to look like my final sketch.

My goal was to create a “click bait” type sketch, where a person who didn’t believe in climate change would click on the sketch and the sketch would suddenly change, showing a secret message while the mouse is pressed. While researching slogans that anti-global warming people used, I found “Climate Change is a Hoax” to be one of the popular lines, so I decided to use this as the centerpiece of my sketch. While the mouse is pressed, I wanted to show how our country is already suffering the effects of climate change, and wanted to portray California’s wildfires and the rising waters of Florida’s ocean. As a visual strategy, I decided to create a sunny day scenery while the mouse is not pressed, with a billboard in the middle that says “Climate Change is a Hoax.” In the sky, I put the line “Click me if you agree that our planet is not warming” as the click-bait. I used if statements to make the clouds move, and created my own functions for the billboard, and trees. After I finished the “top” layer of my sketch, I started on my secret message layer. For this layer, I used mouseIsPressed for all, and made it so that if the mouse is pressed, certain shapes and texts would appear/disappear. If you press on the sketch, flashing circles that represent fire appears on top of the trees, as well as water flooding the houses. The texts “California is Burning” and “Florida is Flooding” appear on the bottom of the sketch, as well as the word “NOT” in the middle of “Climate Change Is A Hoax!” “Click Me If You Agree That Our Planet Is Not Warming!” changes to “THERE IS NO PLANET B!”

One thing I had a difficult time with was creating the flooding effect. I was researching how to create a wave effect in p5, but most of the code had certain lines I haven’t learned yet and therefore, couldn’t understand. I found the code I remixed from the example page on p5 by Daniel Shiffman, which allowed me to add the flood effect. This code used the for loop we just learned, so I tweaked the number of the starting point for x as well as the stroke weight and vertex points.

Overall Reflection

I wanted to create a simple design that targets those who are against climate change and do not believe in it at all. I thought by making the “top” layer peaceful and bright colored, it wouldn’t attract suspicion to the secret message that lies underneath when the mouse is pressed. I feel like my project is very straightforward as well as the visual- the “top” layer portrays a “perfect” world that we currently live in, and once the mouse is pressed, it shows the true reality of the state our planet is in. This sketch is definitely targeted towards those who do not believe in climate change in America, but I think the next step would be to include other countries as examples of the effect of climate change.