We had another interesting second workshop with everyone this week. Previously, we’d explored the problems of having better conversations online about environmental issues and how objects from museum collection could play a part in bringing environmental issues to life. In this workshop, we began exploring how images and sounds shared online (with creative commons licences) and interactive technology could also help.
For creative commons images and sounds, we used websites to find photos, videos and sounds that related to the environmental issues everyone was interested in. For interactive technology, we began talking about video-sharing websites like YouTube and TikTok as the basis for what we might design together in the project, as they are very popular with people aged 16-19 (and older, the so-called Gen-Z). We discussed everyone’s experiences when watching YouTube videos – how you choose what to watch and for how long, and when and why you chose to stop watching.
Websites like YouTube and TikTok could then be the online places where a “museum of the future” could exist and the place to tell short stories – using museum objects – about environmental issues. However, they have a lot going on behind the scenes, such as how they work out which videos to recommend we watch according to our previous viewing behaviour. A video by Tom Feltwell, Senior Research Software Engineer at Open Lab, explained what goes on with YouTube’s video recommender .
This all led up to our next task: to make short videos about an environmental issue. These videos would be something that someone aged 16-19 might expect to watch on YouTube Shorts or TikTok (so, less than a minute long). And, because videos will be short, they might make one point or ask one question about an environmental issue. We’ll be using a tool called WeVideo to make these videos and looked at where to find creative commons images and sounds to use in them.
In our third workshop, we will look at the videos we’ve all made and work out what sort of online tools would make them easier to make.