Over the course of Year 3, one of the themes I became interested in is how our own childhood nostalgia and memories can influence digital design thinking and machine learning.

Can machines write a children's novel? explores the notion of generating simplistic imagined literature books for children, through machine learning and rule-sets - alongside machine creativity. I fed the AI Enid Blyton novels, to realise 3 graphical book outcomes. These books were a personal favourite as a child, as the story and language are filled with adventure and imagination.

During Do you want to escape? I explored escapism and nostalgia in response to play. In Virtual Reality, I created a mundane environment composed of ordinary objects; through the use of audio, memories from my childhood are triggered. The power of nostalgia can lead our memory to favour a utopia, taking us back to a time we believed life was simpler.

The Visualising Global Natural Disasters project explores a different thematic to my other two projects. This project explores ways of visualising data through design, science and technology as it compares and visualises reported global natural disasters between 1900 to 2018. This theme was relevant as it affects society in different ways. My output consists of five A2 posters representing five global natural disasters: volcanic activity, earthquakes, drought, extreme temperature and wildfires. This visualisation is represented through the circular lines which work their way outwards; through position and layout, this is representative of a globe and time. The data is read from the centre, outwards. The fullest lines represent the years with the most data recorded. Placing the data side by side allows viewers to experience how many occurrences of each disaster are recorded. For my choice of colour palettes, I went onto Photoshop and selected colours from either: images of the global disaster they represented, or colours relative to representing each disaster at its most or least recorded disasters in a year. For my extreme temperature palette, I took the colours from the BBC Met Office weather warnings chart. I took the red tone to convey the most disasters recorded in one year, and used the yellow tone to convey the least disasters, then smoothed between the two values.

See below for each graphical output:

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