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Parsons MFA Design&Tech

Ning Sui

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PETPET

Mobile App Simulation of PET Influence to Environment

  • education-learning
  • mobile
  • FACULTY
    Thesis Studio

    David R. Carroll

    Katherine Moriwaki

    Writing and Research

    Andrew Zornoza

    Andrew Zornoza

    Mobile applications have been widely accepted among children, they attract children’s attention by vivid animation and effects. PETPET increases their awareness and expands their consciousness of environmental degradation. The App PETPET is utilized to record bottled water consumption, importing this record into a virtual world. Then, PETPET simulates the negative and irreversible effects of plastic disposal, so that children will realize that the impacts of using plastic bottles made by PET to their descendants.

  • Project website

  • PETPET is a​ mobile educational application that helps elementary school teachers doing environmental education specifically helping them teach about the impacts of using bottled water. The application will “adopt” everyday leftover PET plastic bottles as virtual pets in children’s smart devices. One of the “PET” in PETPET represents the animals k​ept primarily for a person’s company or protection,​such as cats or dogs, and the other ”PET” represents P​olyethylene Terephthalate, a kind of industrial plastic material g​enerally used in packaging such as water bottles.

    PETPET is developed based on the latest ios 8 coding language Swift by connecting open source Camfind image recognition API to identify the types of bottles. According to the result of image recognition, PETPET generates corresponding digital bottles from all available bottled water brands in the market. It compresses the long break down process into one week, and each bottle has its own timer separating three bottle status:New, Twisted, and Pieces.

    There are three missions in PETPET which will be triggered either by the timer of each bottle or iPhone’s built in ambient light sensor. Every mission simulates one impact directly caused by using bottled water. During the one-week-long period of time, children will be able to collect bottled water in PETPET, view the changes of bottle status, and find a solution to overcome the missions.

    The whole process is designed to be completed about one week, and there is an corresponding lesson plan which functions as a guidance for teacher implementing and adjusting the content to fit school’s’ curriculum. In order to show the whole process in the exhibition, the three missions will be demonstrated separately on three smart devices. So,the visitors can fully experience the image recognition and three missions in a very short period of time.


    Ning Sui

    Ning Sui is a Brooklyn Based video editor, motion graphics artist, and mobile user experience designer. She moved from Beijing to New York to complete her Bachelor's degree of Television Production, and continue pursuing her Master degree of Design & Technology at Parsons while working as a freelance. Her clients include Chef Mario Batali, law firms, designers and mobile startups. Ning is a believer that interaction design on mobile platform has same important meanings on education and other purposes.

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