Pre-Capstone Reflection | week 3
This week I presented 23 ideas to our whole capstone class and then narrowed that down to 3 before presenting again. I revisited these ideas several times, throwing out half at one point because I either felt like I’d expended any interest I had in the topic or simply felt like I was boxing myself in too early.
After presenting, I spent a while mulling over written feedback from my classmates and created a little graphic to keep track of which topics people immediately gravitated towards.
Some of my ideas were more practical or grounded than others, but that didn't seem to stop people from shouting out the ones they thought would be cool to see. At the top of both charts was an exploration of how virtual reality could impact our empathy towards groups of people or specific policies. After that was anything midwest—seems like targeting midwest people anything about midwest culture would be a hit. I get pretty existential about the midwest.
After narrowing it down to three topics (which I tried to choose by how different they were), I began to think about how feasible these ideas were.
- A field guide through the flora and fauna of the world, generated by an AI trained on wildlife illustrations.
- A visual dream journal! I wake up with images from my dreams a couple times a week, and some of them get pretty wacky.
- An exploration of how virtual reality could impact our empathy towards groups of people or specific policies.
After discussing these ideas with a couple of people, I decided that the latter would be far too time-consuming for this 1-year window we have. The dream journal would be really fun to explore, but I felt like the potential to have much impact on readers was much lower than the field guide.
