Interact
The Energy-Poverty Interaction
Energy Poverty is a reality in New Zealand for at least 1 in 5 families.
STATEMENT OF INTENT
I would be paired with Von Durban for this assignment, and from this point onwards we had a rocky start - which would be picking a completely new SDG (Sustainable Development Goal) than the existing ones we have already done from the previous assignments. We ultimately went with my idea.
The SDG my group will focus on will be SDG 7; "Ensuring access to affordable and renewable energy". The chosen statistic being; " Energy poverty is a reality for at least a fifth of New Zealanders " seemed to be a challenging statistic to find causes. However, looking through recent studies made by MBIE and other energy-related companies,
The chosen statement of cause follows;
" The cause of energy hardships correlate towards the payment of over 10% of the household income."
This statement seemed to be the most correlating issue on energy bill payments, which could take numerous things into account such as high payment rates for energy bills and low-income households being too common.
DESIGN PROCESS
We made iterative sketches to push out our ideas visually, in the early phase of the assignment Black and white assets were used to represent our draft ideas. We also made changes around with what we had come up with in the final.
Before, we had only one bar that would indicate the Energy level. From there we decided to add a Health Bar - to represent the livelihood of said New Zealand. Initially we thought the falling coins would be the only interacting, which the user would try to catch as many of, to increase the energy bar.
But since the addition of the health bar, we added the interactive click feature of the furniture, which were thought to be wasting electricity more, for the cost of having a sufficient standard of living.
Initially our statistic was drawn towards the Sustainable Development Goal 6: “Clean Water and Sanitations”.
Before shifting over to SDG 7, we were able to find an art direction, with our code being inspired by Kurzgesagt.
We started to look into SDG 7. Specifically at the statistics of Energy Poverty in Aotearoa. We decided to lead with the stat: Energy Poverty is a reality for at least one fifth of New Zealanders.
Throughout the remaining weeks, we both brainstormed ideas in which an interaction can be conveyed to inform the users on this stat. We initially made storylines, doing step by step drawings, making notes on our miro board - just to see what our potential storyline would be for our interaction. In the end, we decided to make a game interaction, where the user is bound to lose - and thus, giving us the opportunity to share our statistics and inform our users.
By the second to last week, we were already underway. I began coding out our game, and Von was providing many assets using Illustrator.
From the start menu, the user is controlling the Kiwi using the keys “a” and “d”, for left and right. The aim of the game is to try and collect as many coins as you can, in order to keep the energy bar stable, as it depletes.
The depleting health bar is shown to represent the standard of living, and so clicking on furniture around the house would halt the Health bar - at the cost of the energy bar depleting faster.
This change of event represents the usage of electricity when people interact with energy consuming aspects in the house, but at the same time, provides comfort for them in their household.
The rate of the two bars decreasing faster than the Kiwi being able to grasp onto the coins was intentional, and to reveal what our state is; Energy Poverty is a reality of at least 1 in 5 families. When either the energy bar or health bar reaches 0, the game is over.