Durham Beltline Reflection

Constraints:
Overall I enjoyed the design charrette project, though I found it stressful to condense a project, especially a group project, to a 2 week period. Having only a 2 week period for my design process meant that I had to condense certain aspects of it, and also accelerate others. I feel as though I spent too much time focusing on just the logo, when the branding system as a whole was more important. As goes the provided topic, I actually very much enjoyed the duke beltline. It was nice getting out of the studio and doing research by experiencing a location, and additionally I enjoyed the chance to imagine what would be while creating our interventions and branding. I think in the case of this as a 2 week project, providing a topic worked better than developing our own.

I understand the opportunity for a larger sum of work to be done in group projects than one could just do alone, and the valuable experience it may give related to future work experiences, however in this project I felt my group could have had a better synergy. I was concerned at many stages of the project that the work we agreed to divide would not get done, and that I had to force some of my group members to engage so we could decide on what and when the parts of the project were getting done.

Opportunity:

I think the biggest takeaway I have from this group project was the importance of playing to everyone’s strengths and dividing the work so the project can be done more efficiently. In the future I hope I can apply this better to group situations as I felt like a lot of time in this project our group would just sit there spinning its wheels, while 2 members worked on something and the rest just sat there unmotivated to engage and communicate. In a future focused charette, a better plan of action I think would be crucial. Being able to plan out what needs to be done and when, and setting deadlines for critiquing and moving on from parts of the project would have allowed us to not get bogged down in one area so that every part of our project could have hopefully been stronger. In the future when starting a new design experience or way of working, I believe giving everyone in the groups roles, or discussing which roles would suit each person could help the group dynamic work more efficiently. In this group I felt as Logan and I both took on more leadership roles, and had to fight with the rest of the group to try to get things done with no one else to keep us on track, or to make sure we are meeting our goals.

Application:
I believe normally that working in groups one’s group can have the potential to produce work far greater than just one person, but in the case of this project I felt inhibited in many ways. I felt more motivated than usual to do work for the benefit of the team, but I also felt if I didn’t police other group members than they would not do their own share of the work. In many cases, being my own fault, I tend to hoard a majority of the work, but in those cases it’s mostly because I know that my group members (from past experiences) do not live up to the work expectations required by the project.  I felt that the only increase in productivity of this group was that more work was produced, though I do not believe it is as high quality as it should have been. I think the foundation of our ideas were good, and the video, presentation, website, and signage were also of higher quality, but there were definitely areas within those and the AR that were not of finished-project quality. As my own contribution to the group, I worked on the logo (with Logan), website, presentation, branding (with Logan + Allison), and then aided in furthering the poster and small parts of the video and AR. I feel Logan did a great job with the video and helping develop the Logo and Branding, but our other group members spent too much time passing off the poster between each other that it did not meet final level qualities. I also believe that the AR portion of the project could have been a lot more fleshed out and solidified so it made more sense in the context of the trail. I think overall our group synergy needed improvement, I probably could have done more to help make sure everyone was engaged and that every part was high quality, but at a certain point it gets difficult to police everybody.

Presentation:

The following link shows our design process, deliverables, and reflection:

• https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bx8W79xGq1vCc0FMR3JvWDFTQWM
  (in the design charette google drive folder)

 

Future Recommendations:

I think the biggest suggestion for future collaborations, would be to set roles and predetermined deadlines while making sure every member of the group engages equally.

– Conor Lenhardt

Duke Beltline Trail

Logan LaBo, Conor Lenhardt, Sam Hasan, Allison Ubinas, Arianna Slade-Duncan

 

Initial Visit:

Witnessed use of trail already.
People walking, eating food, walking dogs. Trail goes through a variety of areas from restaurants and shops to suburban neighborhoods. Parts of the track already concreted over, many parts are also very unaccessible currently due to overgrowth of nature.

Rich history in durham connected to the tobacco industry, many old tobacco buildings have been repurposed into apartments and shops.

 

Current “new culture” durham is pushing to develop. Durham has outline in 2004 a plan to develop the culture and arts and arts in durham.

A wealth of new restaurants, shops, fashion, art, music have all sprung up in the past 10 years that promote this connected culture partially inspired by Durham as a collective and “brand” city of the bull. Small businesses like Runaway (clothing) capitalize on this durham brand and culture.

 

Design Plan:

• Leverage History and Culture of Durham
• Downtown as the hub of Durham’s cultural life while emphasizing activities in neighborhoods
• Creating interactive spaces that combine crowdsourcing and history to educate and entertain differing users
• Create nodal system that promote various activities along the trail, but are all connected together by these crowdsourced interactive displays.
  
  

  

  

  

Learning Concept Map

Chapter 7: Learning

Conor Lenhardt, Sydney Chance, Madi delCharco, Abby Herman

Learning is a complex, social, and multidimensional process relating to the acquisition of new skills and thinking. Within creating a networked learning ecology, one being that facilitates the optimal amount of learning, Thackera lays out 9 principles that break down the designed learning ecology. These principles being: time and tempo, place and space, meaningful projects, technology networks, testing and assessment, mentors, mass collaborative learning, copyrights and crypotolopes, and playtime. Some of the main ideas coming from these principles include placing importance on active learning, and giving people time to think. Learning needs to be less about memorization of facts, and more about thinking deeply about the topics people are involved with. Learning is also more greatly synergized by learning in a social and collaborative environment. These principles apply to an idealized learning system, many would consider solely to be in education though that’s not the only case.

Learning systems are not limited only to education and school systems. Learning systems are part of many every day systems. Learning as a whole is primarily a social process between other people which allows for skill advancement. A few modern day examples of learning systems are standardized testing, online education, and edutainment. Standardized testing for example, begins at a young age and continues through the collegiate level of learning. There are some who argue that standardized testing is working and others who argue that it is not worth putting people through the stress the tests usually entail. Tests such as the SAT, have been relooked recently as well as testing in elementary school classrooms. Testing is just another way to asses what one is learning or how well they are learning the subject matter. Online education is another example of a learning system that has become popular in the recent decades. There are many proven benefits to online education systems. For example, it allows students to learn in their own “place and space” and promotes “anytime/anywhere” learning at a self determined pace. These benefits to online education systems are appealing to the prospective student, however it also has its setbacks. For example, they are heavily reliant on technology which can oftentimes get in the way of learning. It’s also lacking that face-to-face interaction and hands-on participation that are huge aids in learning. In online education systems, these things are usually non-existent. Finally, we examined edutainment. Edutainment is an attempt to use ‘fun’ media, such as TV shows and videogames, to teach children during the hours they are not in the classroom. The main issue with edutainment is that it buys into the point-to-mass model of learning. Rather than fill up time with prepackaged content, we need to make it possible for learners to use their own time more flexibly and actively.

Taking the insights from these examples, as a society leveraging a social ecology to promote learning should be one of our main priorities. We should involve people in their own learning process and work together to redesign learning systems in other fields outside of education. Ultimately, learning should be treated as a “designable” system where the shortcomings can be improved upon to increase the quality and value of learning in the whole of society.