Justin Yu Fanclub

Mississauga | Turning STEM into STEAM

Diversity Fuels Innovation

High-Level Project Summary

We developed an art piece that represents how diversity fuels innovation. In the status quo, space agencies are getting more and more diverse, but the majority of employees are still males of the ethnic majority of the country. This makes innovation more difficult, as you get fewer unique perspectives. The purpose of our art is to create an understandable medium to inspire people from all walks of life to look into the STEM field!

Link to Final Project

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jcyDoevrcw5qre7d82-3gUWtiwDKhWJOvbi1agTEY_w/edit

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mIbw9L6cbqj747B_8QgHWMGzHj36eufm-slwo7eQus8/edit#slide=id.g967d9b3c40_0_855

Detailed Project Description

Our project is an art piece that represents the importance of diversity in space agencies such as NASA. We chose to depict the James Webb Space Telescope mirror due to its very unique design being reflective of the unique people who worked on the telescope. We believe that diversity is one of the most important things a space agency can have, since people from different backgrounds will have different perspectives, and different perspectives cause more innovation.

The inner ring of the mirror represents a diverse team that works on projects at space agencies, and the outermost ring represents the things that they have and will be able to achieve. We hope to achieve increased awareness and interest in the space industry among people of minority groups, such that we can increase innovation.

We made our project with markers. The vibrant colors make the art seem more inviting, and the simplistic style eliminates a lot of interpretation and makes our art easy to understand.

Space Agency Data

We used images from the James Webb Space Telescope as inspiration for our art. We also used NASA's data and analytics on its diversity.

We also reviewed some NASA art challenge submissions from the past for inspiration and posters made by NASA's JPL

Hackathon Journey

First of all, it was our first hackathon and we were looking for a challenge that didn't involve programming. Then. we stumbled across "Turning STEM into STEAM" challenge that involves creative skills and cultures! We chose this challenge because we have the skills of art and knowledge about diversity and also Space! We had some setbacks for example, we originally plan to do something with Climate Change but we thought of new ideas that were better. Then, we had one good idea. we were all interested in the James Webb mission. We decided to do an art based on how diversity is important to space exploration. We also used the JWST to make the art frame. Another reason why we chose JWST is that many people for different ethnic backgrounds and fields contributed to this project. As a group, we would like to thank every each member for their contributions to our project and that everyone played a role. In the mere future, we might bond together again with a similar project!

Special thanks to Kelvin for being the group's art person and Justin and Yandan for being cool.