During week 5 we had a discussion with our workshop tutor to make sure that our project ideas were heading in the right direction.

Myself and Alex gave Clive (the workshop tutor) a rundown of our project idea, explaining how the project idea was going to be further developed from my original Research and Development project idea, ‘Planets of Change’.

We explained how we wanted the project to be an open space for users to talk about certain issues for others to see, along with also being able to explore the different contributions that have been made by the various users.

It was explained that ‘Moon’ (a project previous spoken about in this blog) was a key area of research that formed the ideas around the current project idea.

However, although clive understood what we was heading towards, he pointed out that the current idea/ethos is very similar to the ‘Moon’ project.

Myself and Alex had already thought about this certain issue as we don’t want the idea behind our project to simply be a re-designing of Moon.

Clive had suggested some further research into certain topic areas, such as the oil and energy crisis.

After this was mentioned I stated that when first conceptualizing the project this was the main thoughts I had in mind.

These ideas were brought about by my personal worries over the current oil and energy crisis. These are issues that will be effecting us in the 15-20 years and the rumble of these issues are starting to be felt in todays society. However I feel that these issues are not being spoken about widely enough, leading to a lack of interest with the general population around these topics.

I originally wanted the project to be a tool to be used to bring about the widespread discussion of these issues, allowing them to be widely acknowledged by the various users of the project.

Between myself and Alex we brainstormed different ways in which we can develop our project idea to separate it from being too close to ‘Moon’.

We went back to think about the initial plan for the project, to produce a project that brings about discussions.

Leading on from this we felt that adding some way to comment and develop someones contributions to the project further would uplift our project idea away from a simple ‘contribution’ project.

When exploring the ‘Moon’ project you come across a range of different contributed drawings and messages, but a lot of these messages contain some ‘explicit’ content, a lot of which has no relation to the main idea of the Moon project.

We saw the creation of this issue was down to the fact that Moon is left completely open to what can be contributed. There is no direction in which the user is pushed towards, resulting in information that has no real value.

To stop our project being subjected to pointless/random information, we felt that by targeting our contributors towards certain issues (for example a title such as ‘climate change’) it would help to form different pockets of contributions related to the chosen title/starting point.

We also felt that to form a project strongly centered around the discussions between its contributors, it should include a feature that allows users to reply/respond to the contributions made by others.

To achieve this we came up the idea that when someone replies or responds to a contribution, the response will take the form of a ‘moon’ that will orbit around contribution that was replied too.

Overall the project discussion between myself, Alex and Clive was extremely useful in the sense that it helped us understand where we were in terms of development and what still needed to be done in terms of developing a strong ethos.

– Michael