Brief: Design an experience that addresses the democratic process
Design methods: literature review & prototype
Teammates: Lili Jason Felix Ana Ann
Since democracy is a very abstract and serious topic, also has loads of aspects. It is hard to find a specific point to start this project, our group started a small discussion, trying to narrow it down to 3-5 points.
And luckily, we made it, chose three topics as our topics, then using a literature review to dig more about it.
How medias influence and manipulate people' opinion
How money influence our democracy
Flaws in our current democracy
I was in charge of the third one.
Literature review
Articlelink：
TITLE：The Flaw in Our Democracy
ISSUE: J. N. LARNED OCTOBER 1899 ISSUE
AUTHOR: Josephus Nelson Larned (May 11, 1836 – August 15, 1913) was an American newspaper editor, author, librarian, and historian. As superintendent of the Young Men's Association Library, he presided over its transformation into what is now the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library.
Review:
A tricky way to let fewer people make decisions for more people.In other words, the legislative representation of a party, in this situation, power is controlled by less than one-seventh of its members by packing the needed number of districts in which its work is surest of success.
It is not in elections that the quality and character of our government are determined. The result of the election is done in party nominations, so sometimes, you are choosing from two or more than two parties, you think it is a right of election, but it is just selection since the candidates are made inside the parties.
Democracy’s doubters tend to accuse democracy of suffering from at least five significant design flaws:1.Short-termism 2. Pain aversions 3.Elite capture 4.Division and conflict 5.Voter ignorance
Also, there are four kinds of citizens make up our society
those citizens who desire good government, and who interest themselves in public affairs simply because of that desire, having no personal objects of place or profit in view(the largest).
those citizens who are too sordidly absorbed in pursuits of gain, or too frivolously absorbed in pursuits of pleasure, or otherwise too much occupied, to give attention to public concerns;
those in the unfortunate social grade where ignorance is so gross, or character so shallow or so debased, that political opinion and independent conduct are out of the question;
those who are actively self-seeking in partisan politics, with keen eyes on something that will bring a reward(the smallest).
Ideation
With the help of Literature reviews, we got better understand of democracy, and the project went to next stage smoothly. And we all believed that “how medias influence and manipulate people' opinion‘’ is an interesting topic and easy to combine with the others.
There are three main media in our daily life
Online platforms (Instagram, facebook, twitter, etc. )
Television
Paper press (newspaper)
Those media have different levels of influence on our lives, and also varied with age.
AS for teenagers, social applications are the main resource of political input, while the old are more likely to be influenced by TV and newspaper.
With all those surrounded, it would be harder to achieve real democracy. As known to all, those different media have different political preference, the government will surely control those media as a way to control public's mind, so our prototype mainly focuses on how your original opinion being manipulated by those media.
Prototype
Lights are very visual matter, so we choose it as a symbol of people' opinion, and use coloured plastic cards as filters, the colour of light will be altered after filters.
Each filter has distinct meaning, which also affiliates with how strong it is, for instance, red is a more intense filter than blue and yellow，which means when you put red filter on, the colour of light will completely change to red.
Unlike that of green or other lighter filters, they may not totally change your colour,more like combine the original colour with that of filter, so we decided to use the red one as "Online platforms " which is universally considered as the most abused media. What's more, we use the orange one as "paper press" and the blue one means Television.
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