I believe that cleaning up the bayou would not be able to be done with one new technology on its own.  It would need to be a new system and culture of helping to keep it clean.  Through brainstorming, I split up my ideas into two categories – self sufficient technologies that can run at all times and others that can be implemented in this new culture of keeping it clean through different activities.

 

My brainstorming helped immensely during the process. It was interesting to me to see the prototypes that turned out as almost perfect replicates of what I had imagined and others that were driven by ideas after seeing the materials around me.

 

 

 

Other brainstorms: 

Examples of my different categories are shown below:

Self-sufficient:

This is the fan-directing vacuum collecting barrier.  Others of this style include a motorized lift system that filters large amounts of water at a time by submerging and filtering the contents in a sieve, another barrier that is porous for water to go through but that has a maze-like structure for the trash to be collected in one area in a methodical fashion and two simple technologies that collect trash of different materials.

 

Activity-based:

 

Instead of a hook, this environmentally-aware fisherman uses a horseshoe magnet to attract metallic trash at different depths.  I also made some flippers that are both magnetic and furry to capture different kinds of trash, a pilot-powered mechanical fish which uses biomimetic features to efficiently help with the clean up efforts, and a canoe race with a few adjustments.

 

 

Here are all of the prototypes – components on the left and complete systems on the right.

I became more comfortable as the assignment progressed and the progress became quicker as I learned to think quickly, assess the ideas and put it into a representational model.