Monumental Change

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Inspiration

This project was inspired by the month long Art as Protest installation put on by the University of Washington Black Lives Matter Chapter and Black Student Union to take down UW's central George Washington Statue, in addition to meeting their seven demands on their petition. Public monuments dedicated to prominent slave-owners encourage us to remain accepting and largely ignorant of the morally-corrupt history of the U.S., and in many ways attempt to deny the progress made by social justice activists. A need to critically re-evaluate and re-shape our idea of which historical figures should be publicly celebrated via monuments has been present for decades, but is especially in the minds of people today.

What it does

Our mobile app allows users to see all monuments and historical sites near them- when they are close to a particular site they can interact with it in Augmented Reality (AR), viewing BIPOC-sourced information on it's history, local discussions, and opportunities to get involved in petitions or other forms of historical site activism. We chose AR because we felt it would prompt meaningful interaction with these sites, re-contextualizing online discussions and information as being physically part of the world around us.

How we built it

We chose Flutter as our mobile development platform for its usage of Dart, which is much closer in syntax to our teams' familiarity with Java, as well as its ability to easily port our code to multiple platforms. Our team utilized Google Maps and it's APIs to search for and display monuments within the "map view" of our app, as well as offer directions to specific sites. ARCore powers the AR aspects of our app, rendering important information as needed. Firebase is used to store all of the curated information on display, as well as account information if a user wants to make one in order to contribute to discussions.

Challenges we ran into

Our team had very limited familiarity with mobile development coming into this project- those who did had only some introductory knowledge and had never worked with Flutter before. None of us had previously used the tools/libraries we chose for this project, and led to much of our work consisting of reading, understanding, and piecing together documentation to create our app. One challenge we faced was with the Google Places API. Our issue was that we wanted to retrieve search results that were of type historical site, monument, and statue, but the places API unfortunately didn't give that information with a type parameter and we had to use keywords instead and filter our results from the JSON. Also, it was pretty difficult to adapt to Flutter's application state in relation to our build methods because normally we think of changing the UI itself, but you actually change the state and the UI continuously rebuilds itself which was pretty confusing at first. Lastly, since Flutter is a relatively new framework and Dart is also pretty new, there wasn't as much ease of access to resources as we may have had for other languages/frameworks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite our unfamiliarity with this space, our team is proud to present what we've created. We were able to leverage each other's skills and hard work to create a fully-functioning application that renders AR elements, interacts with Google Maps, and retrieves information from our own database in real time.

What we learned

We learned a great deal about creating mobile applications, and how to use external libraries to create elements and functionality within our app. Much of early discussion revolved around avoiding common pitfalls of taking on the role of curators of information, and led to our emphasis on information transparency as well as inclusion of easy avenues for others to point out our mistakes.

What's next for Monumental Change

Expanding beyond the Greater Seattle Area, tackling the world, working with and championing BIPOC scholars

Resources + Research

We really enjoyed reading articles and citing perspectives from these pieces!

Example Monuments https://seattlespectator.com/2020/01/23/confederate-monuments-in-seattle-hidden-in-plain-sight/ Discussion Board Quotes http://www.dailyuw.com/arts_and_leisure/article_fbefd4c6-c5a8-11ea-830a-03395e0a2b2d.html

Background on George Washington Statue https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/08/14/44267722/uw-protesters-embark-on-month-long-art-installation-at-george-washington-statue

Built With

Submitted to

Hack'20
- Winner First Timer Special Recognition

Created by

I setup the flutter project/environment, enabled and configured Google APIs including Places API, Identity API, and Token API. I implemented the UI designed by Sara using Dart and Flutter. I setup and implemented a Firebase project to integrate with our application to store user credentials, user's saved data, and monument data. I collaborated with Matt and Zack on merging the maps component to the project and with Tanner on merging the AR monument view component to the project.

Patrick Render
Software Developer & Student @ UW
I worked on the UX and Interaction Design for this piece. I have never designed for Augmented Reality before. I learned a lot and am proud of what we made!

Sara Behbakht
I fleshed out the AR functionality of our app within Flutter. I'd never worked on mobile development or used AR libraries before so it was definitely challenging.

Tanner Poling
I worked with Matt to create our app's tracking of the user position and created markers for statues and historical locations to appear on our map within a 3-mile radius of the user. I have never worked with flutter before so I spent a lot of time reading about API's and dart code on gitHub in order to be able to create our app.

Zack Lynch
I implemented some google maps features using the Google Places/Maps API. Zack and I created a ListView that displays points of interest (monuments, statues, etc.) under the google map and displays markers within the 3 mile radius of the User's location. We also created a Json model to retrieve a list of Places and their corresponding details to use for our map and list.

Matthew McVicker