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- By Petra Kubernátová and Maximilian Roele -
Everyone has a different perspective on the future. Some say the future has already been determined by the things we've done, while others actively work towards a better future. With the press of a button, you too can see one of the many visions of the future - even if it's a future you never desired, but still set in motion with that single action.
“You can't stop the future
You can't rewind the past
The only way to learn the secret
...is to press play.”
― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
What is it?
A world 'in flux' means a world that is always changing in big ways. Wars, political changes, massive outbreaks of diseases, climate change... all of these things can happen in the future, but we aren't sure when. These are all undesirable visions of the future and you can make it happen by pressing a button! It started with the desire to do something to visualize data, and we ended up with the goal of visualizing potential futures for the whole world, based on data about the world today to keep it semi-realistic. We built a LED world map; when the lights go out, forests have been burned or deforested completely, or populations have died out due to disease, nuclear disasters, or simply of old age.
Did you know that the world was predicted to end at least twelve times in the last ten years?
A second goal was to make people think about how their actions influence their future in general, and how small actions can have big consequences. At first, we thought that visitors may not really feel a strong connection between their action of pressing the button and seeing a scenario unfold. During the exhibition, many people said they felt 'in control' because they just caused a nuclear disaster, or felt guilty because they just deforested South America, so in some sense they felt 'responsible' or connected to it. And others just liked pressing the button ;)
Data
Our data came from various sources such as the WHO, the European Union, the UN's databases and older data from the Earth Policy Institute. This included:
Birth and death rates to determine population changes
Wildfires and bushfires per region
Spread of infectious diseases
The amount of nuclear reactors in certain areas
Deforestation per region
Current international relations between great powers
Various views on climate change and flooding
We used these current data trends and extrapolated them to the extreme to create 'extreme' scenarios that show severe effects on populations or areas around the world.
Video
The Build
Parts
Digital RGB LED Strip WS2812B (30 per meter) (60 per meter would help with more accurate LED placement and dividing the continents)
Big ass capacitor (2200 uF 35V)
330 Ohm resistor
Arduino Uno
Wood panel 80 x 60 cm
Old PC power supply (5v, 15A)
Cotton sticks
Jumper cables
The building process
We first tried to use a grid to map out the whole world for the board, but we ended up projecting a world map and tracing this. We then placed smaller holes as the outlines (8 mm) and created the larger masses of land with larger holes (20 mm and 28 mm).
We painted all the holes white, then taped white baking paper on the back. This baking paper helps with diffusing the light so the board looks nicer.
We attached the power supply to the LED strip to test if it worked and if the diffusion of light was alright. There was soldering and creative use of tape involved. The big ass capacitor is soldered to the + and - wires right where they connect to the power supply's wires, like this.
We glued cotton sticks on the back to help distance the LED strip from the baking paper, otherwise the LEDs would be too close and their light wouldn't be diffused. The cotton sticks are glued to the wood itself by making small holes in the baking paper. The picture is from later in the process.
We cut the LED strip into smaller strips and soldered wires to make it more flexible and longer. Then, we simply glued it onto the board and taped the ends. The raised parts were glued to the cotton sticks.
Another test to see if it works. We labelled the LED strip with numbers to make it easy to remember which LEDs belong to which region. Here, it's connected to the Arduino with a 330 ohm resistor in between the data wires.
We programmed the LED strip. Each individual LED can be controlled to show a different colour, so we could give each continent a different colour as well. However, this took quite some time as we had 90 LEDs that sometimes all had to be programmed individually, depending on the scenario.
We mixed some sound to add a 10-second soundbite to each scenario, such as an explosion for a nuclear disaster, or the sound of fire in the forest/bushfires scenario. We wrote some short code to play these MP3 files through Processing.
Coding
You can download the code by clicking here (.zip). It includes the Arduino LED strip code and the Processing screen/audio code. Everything is hard-coded as we only had limited time left to code everything. We didn't include the audio files, you'll have to make these yourself or change the filenames referenced in the Processing code. The following external libraries were used:
Adafruit Neopixel Library. This is used to control the LED strip and program the individual LEDs. It also comes with a few cool examples
Bounce2. We had an issue with our Arcade button randomly sending 1s, or acting as if it was pressed, when it wasn't pressed. This library solved it by 'debouncing' the button.
Minim for Processing to play MP3 files.
Audio
The sounds were created by using free stock sounds and mixing these together with Audacity. Here are all the sounds that were used in the project:
Disease: Dobroide - Ambulance, ThisIsMiniMe - Human Coughing
Deforestation: Nature Sound Spa - Charming Birds in a Forest, Klankbeeld - Forest Spring 1pm
Mortality: LG - Cafe, Leossem - Ambience City
Nuclear disaster: ryansnook - Nuclear Explosion
Wars: qubodup - Real War, reznik_Krkovicka - distant explosions
Special thanks to...
Ewoolsey on Reddit for the inspiration
Matthijs for having Spotify, a car to transport our stuff and the resilience to deal with our drilling noise
The Communication & Multimedia Design students who took selfies with our project
Everyone who tried it during the Futures Open Lab Expo!
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