Wildfires are worsening as global warming dries the climate and feeds the creation of pyrocumulous clouds that sustain and propagate uncontrollable blazes.
The Environmental Destruction Machine is a website and interactive learning tool that seeks to use a simulation of this phenomenon to encapsulate the key role that humans play in the consequences of climate change.
It presents users with a generated pixelised “forest” terrain where a natural wildfire emerges from a single point (or spark). Users are then invited to personify the role of man-made climate change by interacting with a mouse and see for themselves the destructive consequences of even a single additional flame — an action which the interface makes tempting to repeat.
The project seeks to raise the awareness of the amplified effect that many kinds of man-made environmental damage will have on extreme weather in the future.
Category:
Data Visualisation
UX Design
Experience Design
Tools:
Firebase
p5.js
HTML
CSS
In order to mimic how fires spread in forests, I drew from John Horton Conway’s mathematical model the Game of Life — a set of rules that he designed to create a system of pixels that would “live”, “die”, and “reproduce” autonomously.
Switching out the live and dead pixels for burnt, virgin forest, and ground, these fires spread from tree to tree until they can no longer reach another.
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p5.js codeUser Interface
‘ “We're creating an environment that favors these positive feedbacks, where the fire makes itself worse. It tips the balance between what may have been an ordinary fire in decades past and a fire that can grow into a megafire.” ’
The Guardian
Quote by Neil Lareau, assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno
The website uses Firebase to store all canvases interacted with by users on a cloud and then call them to and display them on the Gallery page.
On the left is a grid of canvases automatically generated with the initial central spark that mimics natural lighting strikes. On the right in stark contrast are those that have been added to by users taking on the role of human beings directly changing weather patterns to worsen wildfires.
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Website