Poor Nutrition

https://www.tes.com/lessons/TuuiUGOyBznf5w/

While most social issues are controversial and popular, poor nutrition is one of those subtle ones that we often forget about. And I am not talking about poor nutrition in terms of not having food to eat but rather to not pay attention to our own diet. For this reason, I decided to create a pedagogical list that will first inform its users and then invite them to see by themselves how problematic the issue is. The first two modules addresses what exactly a poor nutrition is and what are the negative consequences of such diet. The decision to use a slideshow for the first module "What is a Healthy Diet" is to provide a medium where the user can learn at its own pace to fully understand the concepts explained.
Additionally, I use simple websites throughout the list and invite the user to ponder and answer some questions. Typically, the questions are open to incite the user to think and realize by himself/herself that caring about our own diet is important. In the third module, I invite the user to take a food disorder test. The goal is to give the user a better idea about how a diet can impact someone's life. After taking the test, the user may or may not find anything problematic with its own diet but the process will certainly make him or her realize that other people do. The fourth module gives an extended experience about the user's own diet. With the help of a mobile application, the user is invited to track his/her diet for a few days and compare the results with what is recommended. The following modules push the user to act and make some modification to its own diet to improve it. The user reports then on some of the changes they have observed throughout their experience.
The whole idea is really to get the user to understand and experience what it means to care about his/her diet. For some, it might feel like its too much trouble. For others, they might realize that it is easier than than thought. Ultimately, the purpose is awareness and let the user decide what he or she wants to do about it.

YouTube Sculpting

          One of the first limitations that I noticed as I approached the "YouTube Sculpting" is that it was remarkably easy to not find what I was looking for. Even though I knew that the final product would be an assemblage of mostly random videos, I had pictured in my mind a lot of the sequences that I was hoping to find. I quickly realized that YouTube's Search engine has its own way of thinking. For instance, I would search "walking" in hope to find a person walking from "Point of View" but instead I would be find tons of Walking Dead clips. In most cases, I ended up finding completely random things but surprisingly many still applied to my theme of "Friendship". One instance is the videos of dancing. I originally had this idea of incorporating the different stages of a friendship but as I was digging upon the term Friendship I found out that activities with friends was a whole new subcategory to explore. From there, pillow fights, water gun fights, and many other videos came from. Although I was limited by what YouTube was offering up, I started to embrace that those random videos were simply giving me more ideas that I could think of and then take a couple of new directions. In the end, I concluded that the only limitation was my original idea. There is some creativity in embracing the virtual limits of YouTube results. 
  Another great thing about finding videos is that some videos would already be compilation of something that I was looking for. Finding smiling faces was particularly easy. For instance, some YouTuber decided to collected a bunch of videos from movies where actresses smile. I could then cut the video and select different of those as if I would have collected them all individually by myself. This not only added originality to my video but saved me a lot of time. One limitation to those findings on the other hand is that not every video was suitable for the final montage. Some of them had terrible quality. Others were so long (over an hour long) where it became complex to download the whole thing and edit it. It feels as if some videos were almost immediately disqualify because of their "digital" properties. Fortunately, YouTube filter options helped narrow my searches by selecting shorter videos. 

Twine Poetry

http://talentswat.com/Twine/Home.html

Originally, "A Message" by Coldplay talks about a man who loves a woman despite all the challenges she is going through in her life. The poem focuses more specifically on the fact that the woman has been struggling with personal experiences and the man wants her to know that she doesn't have to be alone, that he cares about her.
Based on such structure, I decided to create a game where the player would have to make a series of choices (where he or she would feel sort of alone) to finally be told that despite what the choices made, it is okay and he or she doesn't have to be alone in all of this.
To achieve such game, I first decided to alter some parts of the poem to enhance this sentiment of loneliness. The player is given the option then to change certain parts of the poem for something that he or she feels more comfortable with. All text options are either negative or neutral. This is once again to make an emphasis that the player is on its own. As the player gets to the end, the game takes a position of someone that cares for the player. The game rephrases some of the selections the player made and shows them on screen. The game tries to make the player understands that he (the game) understands what he or she player is going through. The games ends just like the original poem by telling the player that he or she just needs to come home so everything is okay.
The game is quite simple with only a few text options. To enhance the experience, I believe that the poem should be longer. The intention is really to have the game understand the player in his solitude, the same way the man cares about the woman.

GIF Cinema

Although stories are usually easier to tell chronologically,  I found out that GIF can do the same without necessarily having to conform to a specific order. This is possible only because of the very core feature of any given GIF: the loop. They don't necessarily have a start or end which allows them to tell stories in the order they want.
          As I was thinking of my story to share, I decided to entirely focus on this principle of loops. First, the story would't necessarily have a particular order. Just like any perfectly looped GIF, it doesn't really matter when it starts because once it comes back it to where it started, it all makes sense. With that in mind, I decided that my story wouldn't require a particular order. Out of all the GIFs that makes the story, any of them could be either the first or last.
          Second, I made sure that each GIF would entirely loop and come back to its original point. The objective being to make the loop feel as if it was inexistent. This is important because it allows the short story within the GIF to be isolated from any other GIF. If the loop is broken with a clear ending, the GIF becomes just one of possibly many parts of a greater story.
         Using cinemagraphs required each GIF to be looped perfectly otherwise things would look odd. For each GIF, I decided to incorporate elements that naturally loop in real life. Those elements would be the ones moving while everything else would remain still.
          As I was putting together each GIF, I realized that cinemagraphs, if they are well done, have the power to transports us into a moment of reflexion. A moment where it feels almost like everything has stopped but not entirely. This was an interesting realization because it supported the point that stories doesn't always have to be told chronologically to be understood. The narrative through a GIF is unique because it is not bound to a particular order.

Here's my story now: Me interacting with technology on any particular given day.