Water, water, and....well a LOT of water

Primarily, I have been slowly coming up with questions based on everyday life that I plan to use for to calculate personal footprints through the questionnaire(the development of which is currently being mildly delayed due to learning jQuery in another class, and the realization that use of jQuery could save TONS of coding time.)

I've also been playing with design ideas. I thought of the idea of creating a design that was over 3000 pixels tall, that would incorporate each of the footprint displays on top of each other (carbon, garbage and water, top to bottom) but I don't quite like the direction it was going. I will however put it here to show process/see if someone else likes it:

It was about the time that I started working on the bottom of the design that I realized it really wasn't working how I had envisioned in my head, hence the funky coloring at the bit. Instead I decided to try and go with my garbage footprint design (with some modifications of course) and I'm working on the water footprint area.

I thought the area might be a bit big at first (it's meant to be like a quarry or a canyon stream)...and then I looked up the average water footprint per person (something I'm surprised I hadn't looked up before)...the frightening bit is I might not have thought BIG enough.

You see, here is the original scale I was thinking on:



Each of those blue squares? Each one equals 2000 gallons of water, and there are 256 of them. Quite a lot of water huh?

THAT ISN'T EVEN THE ANNUAL WATER FOOTPRINT OF ONE PERSON! The average American water footprint per day is just over 2000 GALLONS. A DAY. I knew this was going to be quite a bit, BUT I WASN'T EXPECTING A NUMBER THIS STAGGERING FOR ONE PERSON!

So knowing that 356 objects per person isn't going to be something that a browser should be able to handle, I've decided to try looking into fluid dynamics and trying to do it that way. Sounds a lot harder right? Well I found this online: http://codepen.io/stuffit/details/hszvg

It's a free to use/modify/whatever code for fluid dynamics (it includes gravity, though the base example uses 0 as the gravity). I've already played with the code a bit, and it should be easy enough to incorporate into the scene, and if I add lines on the side to indicate the actual amount of water it is representing, it should be fine. (of course, still having scale indicators. Though it's going to be a tiny human if I go that route)

Creating the Survey Form

Work up to this point (from last point obviously) has been spent on creating the survey page, mostly on layout. What I have so far Here.

iPad Form Design

In an attempt to keep things natural and as simple as possible, I've decided to try and design a simple yet interesting layout for the survey that modifies the rest of the piece.

I'm currently working on the idea that the survey will be conducted on an iPad that is fixed in front of the three computer screens. The user will be asked questions and will be provided with a selection of buttons to press to enter their answers. Here is an in-progress example:

I was trying to keep the interface as interesting as possible without making it too busy. I am also doing research into what questions to ask, trying to keep mainly in the realm of daily activities. I also want to have as little text as possible, but I don't want the answers to be too confusing.

Formal Defense Presentation

Link to Prezi:

http://prezi.com/qikmuptosk7n/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy



Picture is mostly unrelated.