Through Our Lives

Zaynab Alsaedy – Peer Mentor, College of Engineering; Abbey Seguin – Peer Mentor, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design; Matthew Eggers, School of Music, Theatre & Dance; Christina Sheckler, College of Engineering and Ross School of Business; Emily Yi, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning; Alexander Constantino, College of Engineering; Alli Torrey, College of Engineering

This prototype of “Through Our Lives” is a short video that allows the audience to witness the day of strangers around the world. It uses Google Street View, a feature in Google Maps that consists of “interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world”. Based on the term “revolve”, the video highlights that even though an individual’s life may differ from another across the globe, we are more similar than different. We all breathe, eat, and walk under the same sky.

Our team was provided the prompt “revolve”, and spent a lot of our time working with different meanings of the word. Since we all come from unique disciplines, during brainstorming, it soon became apparent that we all saw the word differently from each other. As such, we held multiple meetings focused on compiling a whiteboard of subjects related to the prompt — whether it be definitions or other pieces of art — as a way to get everyone thinking about the variety of ways we could use it. And while our final video is only a prototype, we worked to combine these different interpretations into one project. We found that video was one of the best mediums to do, not only because of our inability to meet in person, but because of the different skills it takes to plan and make a video, allowing everyone to make their own contributions.