Paz & Ben: Week 16

Ben’s udpate

The responses are starting to come in for our online survey about common water knowledge, but we need more! Take a minute and go fill out our survey!

We’re putting together a bunch of things for the website besides the survey results, but the data will help establish a picture of what people know about their water and how they live. For example, there is currently a dead heat 50% split between folks that use water filters and those who don’t.

I’m guessing that SciArt readers are more educated than most about their water, but many of the responses still reflect a lack of knowledge about where water comes from. Here’s one representative response: “There's probably an aquifer [or] sources from nearby mountains, or the groundwater. I don't really know.”

There is also a trend of ambiguity in how people describe the taste of their water:

“Kind of mineraly and clean.”

“Maybe a little mineral-ly”

“Slight mineral/gravel-ish taste”

In other news, we’re entering crunch time on the website, so I’ve been working on more mockups in Illustrator and building up the files for the website. Our goal is to combine a variety of different topics under the umbrella of our website, including some basic educational information, resources for DIY activism and scientific water analysis, and imaginative designs for how people might engage with their water differently.

Here’s a rough outline for the sake of blog-transparency:

• User’s Guide to Water
  • Anatomy of a Drop (science)
  • Basically Central (pH, body stuff, and global variation)
• Infrastructure
  • A scrollable animation detailing the path of water through municipal treatment
• Case Studies
  • Pennsylvania (Fracking)
  • Mar Menor  (Turbidity and bacteria)
• Possible Futures
  • Hack your Tap (spec. design)
  • Public monitors (spec. design)
  • Turbidity goggles (spec. design)

And here are some various graphics and layouts I’m working on:

The website only has a few pages, and will have a lot of unique graphics and layouts, so I’m just coding a few HTML pages from scratch. For anyone interested, I’m using SASS, which is a CSS-compiler that makes it easy to update overall styles for the whole site and produces very minified code (Prepos is an easy application for running the compiling).

I always enjoy building sites this way and defining the right declarations for colors, fonts, layout and such. I’m using a console font for most of the text, which I think gives it a down-to-business edginess appropriate for an activist platform. Some of the flat icons and backgrounds above feel a little too commercial, so I will try to make things look weirder as I go.