Participatory installation created and exhibited at Krause Center For Innovation (KCI), Foothill College, Spring 2018 – Present, in collaboration with Elizabeth Sylvan, Senior Research Scientist at Nexmap, and independent consultant.

Description
How do we make sense of the threats to the environment? If we think about the global scale of environmental problems, we may feel overwhelmed and unable to react.

We spend our days in our local communities, seeing the same people, streets, parks and animals. We know the clerk at the grocery store, the tree in front of our home, the birds who live by our school. We witness how our community changes.  We assemble stories from the information we see in our worlds.

Depending on the perspective we bring to stories, we may call them personal narratives, theories or anecdotal evidence.  Or we may call them nothing at all.

The project explores how we understand environmental change exploring the intersection of story, data, and visual language. It invites you to contribute stories about our Bay Area communities. When you contribute your story,  your single data point adds to a larger story that we, as a community, tell about our local natural environment, its land, water and air.

What do you see in your local environment?
What concerns you most?
What are the everyday stories of your experience?

How do people participate:
There are different spaces where participants can add information to.
– Where do You Live?
Participants place a pin on the map
– Which issue concerns you most for your Community?
Participants choose one of the following: 

• Water Pollution
• Animal Habitat loss
• Water Pollution
• Sea Level Rise
• Air Quality 

– Finally Participants can tell a story related to Land, Air, or Water, on a piece of cardboard that they connect to the other stories, adding copper tape and an LED sticker to the circuitry present on the installation.

Materials: Chibichips boards, cardboard, paper, copper tape, LED stickers.