28 October
Zach and I have adopted our classmate Kayla into our group for the final project. Her partner dropped the class, so we decided to ask her to join our team so she would not have to be working alone. This will be an adjustment for all of us as we face several challenges together. First of all, we have to integrate Kayla into our team. She will have the biggest challenges with this, I think, because she will have to learn our project from the inside so she can move forward with us for the interventions we have designed. Zach and I will have to adjust to having a new team member, a new perspective, and new ideas that will come from Kayla. We’re all excited to work on this project together, however, and have planned to meet on Thursday after Kayla and I get off work.
31 October
We had a team meeting today to talk about our various readings, the project, and our possible interventions. We decided to use the white board as a brainstorming tool for ideas on how to “rename” the turtle duck statue in the park. While we don’t know that this will help with our issue, it has been a fun exercise and is bringing us more and more ideas as we work.
There is also an idea to work with a social media campaign of some sort to bring more awareness to the park. I think this would be an excellent option because it will bring awareness to the population of Camden as well as the students of Rutgers. This is one of the many challenges facing the awareness of the park and our events here: citizens don’t always know if they’re welcome in this space, so they may be ignoring our events thinking they are for students only.
We have also considered a QR campaign to bring people into the park.
Zach thinks that making flyers to post around campus might be a good idea, also. This will be something that can be physically posted on or off campus, so it can help bridge the gap between the campus and the outside community.
Another idea that we came up with, this one from Kayla, is to design and post yard signs like the ones frequently seen on campus. This has the potential to be less visible than the flyers because I don’t think we can post them all over Camden, but they are possibly a good way to get attention from the population on campus.
4 November
Today we talked about the Wicked Problems In Design Thinking article. This was pretty impactful to me, because I never really considered the issues that can come with thinking in these manners. After the class discussion we spoke to our groups about our projects.
We have decided to go with a few things, including a QR code that leads to a Google Form that people can submit their own suggestions for a title for the statue. While this statue already has a name from the actual artist, this is just a fun exercise to get people thinking about the space of the park and the features it hosts. This will be part of the social media intervention idea.
I’ve also made a box for people to put suggestions in as a way to frame our stations for a Design Charette style intervention. I’m hoping that people will participate in giving suggestions on how to bring awareness to Johnson Park. This is part of the collaborative effort to put together an idea on how to increase awareness of Johnson Park where we hope to invite staff, professors, students, and locals to come together in a ‘town hall’ type meeting where we can explore suggestions together to decide on a design intervention.
Our second intervention idea is a flyer campaign. Zach will be designing the flyers and sharing them with us later this week. This is part of an intervention that will rely on physical flyers in busy locations around Camden (on and off campus) to hopefully bring more traffic into the area.
We will put together a presentation and share it to the group discussion board on Canvas to get feedback from our classmates, since next week is Thanksgiving and we will be out of class.
11 November
We continued to work on our ideas and plot out ways to bring more attention to the park. We have likely moved away from the idea of staging a design charette to gain more ideas because we have such a limited amount of time to get these projects done before the semester ends. This makes me sad because we got some really great suggestions and ideas for the statue’s title. We will definitely need to reduce the scope of our project if we intend to finish before the last day of class. I think there were some miscommunications between us as a team and understanding exactly what was due on what date. Now, we know we have to actually stage an intervention which changes our perspectives on what is actually manageable in the time we have left.
Removing the added step of having to schedule a time when people could join us for the design charette has really helped us focus more on the intervention ideas we have in the works elsewhere.
25 November
Our presentation has been posted and we have left feedback on our class’s other team. Happy Thanksgiving!
We ended up pivoting over the last week because of time constraints with the semester ending and the actual intervention needing to be staged instead of only conceptualized.
Idea 1, which was designed by Zach, is a “wanted” poster.
I love this design, and it is funny, but it contains the call to action for contacting local law enforcement. Because of my background in marketing, I think this is not a great idea. Mainly because there are people who will take this literally and actually call the police about the statue. It’s possible that people would understand that it is a joke and there would be no issue, but I have learned in dealing with the general public that it is far better to err on the side of caution.
Idea 2, designed by Kayla, is the yard signs that would be put up around campus.
These posters combine calm colors with lovely views of the park, including a group of students/people sitting in the grass together. This is a great way to help people visualize what the park is actually here for. I love that Kayla has added in flowers, which have a hippy-fun vibe to them and make me think of the flowers I have seen in the park.
Idea 3, designed by myself, is a small museum-like display of research projects from people who are tied to the Walt Whitman Center through digital studies, the writing and design lab, or the emerging media program. I think it would be nice to have a place where the work our students design and research could be showcased to give a better idea of what exactly we do over in the Walt Whitman Center with our various programs. Unfortunately, I could not get feedback from Professor Brown about if this was something we could do or not, so I didn’t print out the banner or description paragraphs to define what each project is and what’s going on in this space, so it just looks like a collection of junk.
2 December
We went over our project feedback from the other team. We have decided to move away from the more complex interventions because of the timeline for getting our work done.
We have decided to move away from the “wanted” sign design for flyers and combine the sign intervention with the flyers. This means we will move the designs from Kayla’s signs to a flyer format and post them around campus and near the train and bus stations for maximum visibility.
I have to work this weekend Fri-Sun at PAX Unplugged, so I will be busy during the times that Kayla and Zach meet to print and post the signs.
9 December
We have given a presentation on our design intervention idea of the flyers and posting them around campus and on campus to drum up more business for the Johnson Park area.
One interesting thing I learned today, which may simply be a coincidence, is that our Project Coordinator Doreen Wheeler had to ask some people to leave the AUD room here at the Walt Whitman Center. She is not sure why they came here or what they were doing, but it comes on the heels of our signs being posted so I assume they saw a flyer and headed out here for a quiet place to study together. It is also possible, however, that this was merely a coincidence and had nothing to do with out flyers, and because Doreen was not briefed on our project she didn’t know to ask them how they heard of our space.
I have been incredibly busy for the past several weeks working multiple jobs to cover for a financial situation that has made me pretty desperate to find ways to make money for bills. I know that Kayla and Zach put in a lot of work here at the end, and I appreciate them both endlessly. Kayla put together our final presentation, which I put a few edits on, and then we worked together to deliver our information to our class.
If I could go back in time, I would find a way to put more effort and energy into this project instead of letting everyone down by being so disconnected from my classes and class work.
Unfortunately, we did not have time to track the number of times the flyers helped bring someone to the park, and though we are sure that this intervention will help add traffic to the park we just don’t have a way to measure that in any meaningful way.
