The Streets Ahead | Starling Notes

"The Streets Ahead"

This is a website where I host my in-person audio interviews with the people of the streets of London.

I ask them "How are you feeling about the future?" and then start a chat from there, depending on how they respond.

The site is live here: the-streets-ahead.com

Making it:

Coming to the stage of development I am at now has taken just over a month.

I had no prior coding experience, so this was very challenging, but I used the free version of ChatGPT to help with specific tasks.

I have a number of ideas to make the site more informative and interactive. As I add more interviews, I hope to turn it into a great resource for anyone who might have the same burning questions as me.

Why make it?

As a young person, constantly adjusting to the magnitude and complexity of the world, I wanted to create a place where people could feel a sense of community by comparing their own feelings about the future with other people.

Wealthy people and corporations make money and secure power by promoting certain visions of the future, and they have so much influence, that often their opinions end up shaping what the world comes to be. This project aims to bring those opinions, and hopefully a sense of control, back to normal people.

Talking to strangers breaks a social rule, especially in London, but I wanted to improve my confidence and seek out people's voices that wouldn't normally be heard, because the majority of people avoid being vocal on social media or in politics.

I was very inspired by the 'Streets of London' series made by Pablo Strong, where he questioned people in a similiar format on his YouTube Channel: