Final Project: Group 3 and our first idea

So of course, I failed once again to stay updated with my blogs. Its hard to catch up when your sick and other work becomes top priority! But, I will start from the beginning for the final project description. I really liked all of my group members from day one, even though one of them had made a joke to the entire class about switching out of groups, that made me a little nervous. But, when we were discussing the project, we were all pretty much on the same page, we wanted to build something that would help people. Though my group really wanted to do it in a urban setting, which was not my thing, and it had to incorporate spacial in a new and different way (for lack of a better explanation, maybe be incorporated into a already existing structure or space, I am still not 100% on the original goal there!). The first day that we met, we didn't actually conclude on what we were going to do, but (I cant remember exactly WHY we decided this) we did decide we wanted to work with water and do some sort of water purification. Now, at the time this seemed like a great idea! And we wanted to do it on really polluted rivers, like in Chicago or Detroit or etc. (though I am actually not 100% sure how bad they are, but the idea was to work somewhere close to home). The next meeting we actually designed a system (conceptually) to put at the edge of a park area and have it pull water out of the river running through Ann Arbor. This system was going to be have natural materials to try to filter the river water into drinking water and it was going to be clear so that it could also be used as a learning tool for people. It was also going to be interactive because it was going to allow people to purify their own drinking water by pushing buttons, or interacting with a light game some how, or many other crazy ways that we were thinking of. And this was going to be done in a decent size spacial array so that people could walk through it and see other people and so on and so forth (as you can tell, now that I look back on the idea, its pretty ridiculous!). And we were going to keep solar energy and heliotropism in the picture by having all of the extras be powered by solar panels and by potentially having algae in the filtration system (as you will find out algae concepts started early in this group, if I am remembering correctly). Of course, when we pitched this idea to the class and the professors, lets just say the idea didn't go over very well. But none of the other groups really had anything feasible to show the professors, so we decided to give it another shot, and actually incorporating heliotropism, the arduino boards, and the digital media that we learned how to use. This, of course, was highly suggested by the professors! So, it was back to the drawing board for group 3.