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Last Reflections (11th May)

11th of May - Today our group had its final presentation. The last few days have been quite hectic in terms of putting together our website and our presentation; so we thought it would be better to allocate roles strictly and set the deadline to the 11th of May (which is today). We also realised the brief mentioned producing a 2-minute video showcasing our artefact, something which we didn't take into account before. Fortunately, one member of our team that does media studies was able to edit the screen recordings and add music/video effects to make it presentable. My personal duty was to design the presentation slides in an appealing manner. I decided to take an example template and edit it into Adobe Illustrator with colours more pertinent to our theme. We filled in information for our slides collaboratively, which made our presentation look detailed and full. I greatly appreciate the quieter members of our group ( the ones who joined later or were not reachable for a period of time) dedicating time and effort to make last-minute contributions, as that made a great difference to our oral and verbal presentation.

Figure 1: Template from SlidesGo

Figure 2: Edited template in Adobe Illustrator

I thought it would be a good idea to match our creative practice as a group to an appropriate learning method. The one which I thought suited us the most was Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle as we went through each of the stages described below. Our final artefact is not the end of our creative practice, but rather, the conception of another cycle which is going to propel us towards better ways to achieve future concepts.

Today I also had much fun watching presentations from other groups. Usually, in architecture, other people's presentations are a source of self-doubt and insecurity, but today I got the opportunity to enjoy and absorb other groups' projects without making harsh self-comparisons. This is not only because I am confident and proud of my groups' collaborative efforts, but also because the module as a whole did not require us to produce "perfect" artefacts. Across all of the presentations, these themes recurred frequently, which shows a uniform understanding of what "Engaged Citizenship with Interdisciplinary Practice" means:

Humans as invasive species: Different groups decided to explore the brief from the perspective of humans being the most damaging invasive species.

Designing and appealing to our generation (Gen z): Tote bags were a recurrent artefact in many projects as we all know from experience that it is an item sought after people from our generation, and can therefore be a powerful marketing tool.

Learning skills completely outside our area of study: Just like me, other students from other groups had to learn new software such as Blender and AfterEffects or new skills like crocheting and coding.

Failed experiments: Every group had, to varying degrees, something which didn't work out as they expected it to but in turn, thought them a lesson about creative practice which they can take forward.

As a last reflection on my personal journey, this module has been greatly beneficial in a variety of ways.

It fostered creative collaboration across different disciplines. This is something I had actually wanted to do since joining my architecture course, even though I didn't know it would take on this structure. The brief that allowed us to enact creative collaboration was unexpected, but this only heightened the strength of our joint efforts.

It gave me the chance to enjoy the process. In many occasions, at the end of my architecture-related modules, I tend to feel unsatisfied with my interactions with the brief and with how I rush the creative process towards the end. This module allowed me to think of the brief and our concept for a longer period of time, which in turn meant I could reflect deeper on our process and the knowledge I had acquired. Dr. Simone and Dr. Matt also trusted our group would produce an output by the deadline, which helped immensely with our general anxiety levels regarding this module.

It forced me to learn how to accept imperfect outputs and not judge myself negatively over them. As an architecture student, initially, I tried to plan how the brief and our concept could be executed without fault. But having discussions with my module leaders encouraged me to expand my perception of what a "good" project is and understand that mistakes might push us more towards a solution than "perfect" results. In the end, our group's time lapse and amateur website provided us with points that made our reflection and evaluation stronger.

I will endeavour to take these lessons forward with me and use them to view my architectural practice as a series of processes and responses rather than one single output.

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Artefact Production (20th April - 4th May)

27th of April - Today I attended another hybrid ECIP session. The virtual portion was a seminar on revisiting history through a creative approach. The speaker which caught my attention the most was Victor Ndula and his quest to give more dignity to victims of African conflicts through cartoons. I agree with his point that the average news watcher is more likely to empathise with victims of a European war (e.g. Ukraine) than of an African conflict, since the media has desensitized the public to the carnage of many African wars. This made me reflect on how the media is also desensitising us to the issue of climate change; doomsday tactics are now not enough to spur people to action (Bloodhart, Swim and Dicicco, 2019). More and more people are becoming sceptical about their potential responsibility in mitigating climate change, resulting in negative responses to environmental projects related to that issue. This has implications for our project, as the intended effect on our audience should be interest and curiosity, not scepticism. We will need to ensure that the concept of our platform comes across as a hopeful tool for change.

@ndula_victor on Twitter

The tutorial session started with an exercise from Dr. Matt, which involved crafting a headline for our projects following the style of popular news outlets. Here is my one, following Buzzfeed's clickbait headlines:

"The oldest invasive species will actually surprise you. Click to find out!"

Some other people also said "Which invasive species are you?", which made me think about how impactful it would be as a landing page for our website or as part of our final presentation. It was a minor exercise but it has given our group inspiration to further develop our concept. I am also happy Dr. Simone accepted my anonymous suggestion to open the final presentation to students from outside the module; I believe the efforts all the groups made should be celebrated and witnessed by other people. We then proceeded to have our review with Dr. Matt and these are the key points it was structured around:

The time lapse does not need to be "successful" in terms of algae growth as it is in a contained environment.

Our final presentation should take the audience through our processes and whether the outcomes were expected.

Our apparel has to be cohesive with us bringing awareness to an environmental issue ( it has to be environmentally sustainable)

Our discussions on the time lapse not giving us the result we specifically wanted reminded me of a topic Dr. Simone mentioned to us in the formative feedback, which is the concept of deep time (McPhee,1988). Our group formed hypothesis based on a human perception of time, but we have now realised that algae takes much longer to "colonise" an area and our time lapse is the perfect microcosm for that. Relating this back to one of our exercises in the Ankle Deep Studio, we successfully put on the ethnographist's hat and captured algae behaviour in contained conditions.

Given our feedback, as a group, we decided to start designing our Cargo website, which is a task shared between me and one other team member. I have found some online tutorials to help us, as the website needs to be coded from scratch.

4th of May - This week I could not attend the last ECIP session as I have been sick with fever. However, I have made substantial progress on the construction of our website. Since my other team member could not join me in this task, I have had more time to watch tutorials, even though at first it was not easy to understand how to code. I am currently struggling with inserting text boxes for our "About Us" page and adding glowing text for the online shop. Here are some screenshots of my current HTML:

However, the website now looks close to what we set out in our storyboard and I was able to completely overturn the template we started with, which is the one below. I am very happy I got to do this task as it has taught me how to code, which is a valuable skill in today's digital world.

Bibliography:

Bloodhart B, Swim JK and Dicicco E (2019) “Be Worried, be VERY Worried:” Preferences for and Impacts of Negative Emotional Climate Change Communication. Front. Commun. 3:63. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2018.00063

McPhee, John (1998) [1981]. "Basin and Range". Annals of the Former World. p. 77. ISBN 0-374-10520-0.

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Concept Generation (23rd March - 13th April)

23rd of March - Today I attended this module's second field trip, which was a visit to the  Marine Institute in Langstone Harbour. It was an amazing practical task and a great way to experience how our intended audience could engage with spotting invasive species as citizen scientists.

Again, I was the only member of my group who attended but it was an opportunity to interact with other people and talk to them about their own progress with the brief. Adaeze and I were able to capture a vast range of organisms we found attached to boats and decks, which we later on identified as wireweed and different types of sea squirts . The fact we found so many non-native organisms in just a bucket sample made us understand how many more there must be in the Solent waters.

We then listened to a presentation by Kate Dey, a PhD student researching the spread of the Asian Date Mussel in Portsmouth. She acknowledged that this specie spreads in non-native environments as it stays attached to the hulls of boats from all over the world ( evidence of the influence of human activity on this problem). She also made mention of citizen science and how public involvement would be of great assistance to scientists currently tackling this issue. Her findings give substantial support to the validity and importance of my group's concept, which is important to assess whether we are actually responding to the brief.

30th of March - Today's ECIP session was conducted through a hybrid method. The first hour consisted of an online workshop on storytelling by Dr. Tom Skyes. Storytelling structured according to Freytag's pyramid [1] might not be pertinent to our project since we are building a digital platform with longevity in mind, but our group should definitely embed emotion and sequence in the design of our website. Thanks to this workshop I also came across the concept of "digital storytelling" [2] which platforms like YouTube, Tiktok and Vimeo rely on to ensure their success. Digital storytelling is a short form of media that allows users to share their story or aspects of their daily life. It would be interesting if we could embed that in the process of reporting invasive species ( such as an interactive map that displays new reports), as it is the way people experience most popular digital platforms today. Here is an initial storyboard I sketched during the workshop.

We also had our first review since consolidation week. Talking to Dr. Simone made us realise we were slightly behind schedule and that we need to complete substantial work during the Easter holidays. Since I am the one responsible for producing the model which will be inserted in the water tank for the time-lapse, I will start planning how do that. However, I am very happy about the apparel prototypes one of our team members produced for the website as it will further attract our target audience. I suggested we could put qr codes on them that will redirect the user to our website.

6th of April - 13th of April - The Easter holidays have started and I was able to carve out time to produce the time lapse model. Since it is a miniature version of the Mast Pond, I resized my reference map using the 1:500 scale, which is sufficiently big. I then went to the EPC and selected a range of materials ( metal sheets, wood blocks, mdf and foam) as they will produce different reactions with the algae. The whole process was considerably quick since the model did not need to be aesthetically pleasing.

Bibliography:

[1] The Role Of Storyboarding In UX Design

[2] What is digital storytelling?

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Emerging ideas (2nd-16th March 2022)

2nd of March - Today's ECIP lecture was slightly different from the ones we have had so far. We were presented with some case studies of projects that address environmental issues using public engagement and creative practice. Through our discussions and our analysis, the theme of citizen science (scientific research conducted by members of the public) emerged multiple times and I believe group 1's concept is closely linked to it. I decided to do more research on the topic and I found an article by Dr. Trisha Gura titled "Citizen science: Amateur experts". Here are some arguments she raised which I think we should keep in mind as a group:

“The science has to be romantic, in a way, so that people want to support the research behind it”. How do we ensure our platform targets the intended audience and maintains their interest on the topic of marine invasive species?

“Citizen science is enormously expensive in terms of time and effort managing people, websites and databases” What is the best digital platform we can use to address data collection and storage problems in the scientific world?

I could not debate about these points with my other team members during the lecture as they were not present, but that gave me the opportunity to work with another group and look at their progress. They seem to have understood the brief thoroughly and are moving on to solidifying their concepts. I will also encourage my team members to keep sharing their ideas on how we could consolidate our ideas

9th of March- Today's ECIP session consisted of the groups presenting their initial concepts and intended artefacts. I appreciated being able to look at other groups' creative approaches to the brief and how strongly we are demonstrating interdisciplinary practice. Collating this presentation allowed our group to prepare a clear timeline of what we want to achieve by the 11th of May. Our presentations slides contained information on our inspiration (the Dockyard Mast Pond), our planned research ( how humans aid the spread of marine invasive species), our skills ( across photography, media and architecture) and our intended artefact ( an informative website with a time lapse of material corruptions by algae running in the background) . I presented with just another team member since the others were online due to different extenuating circumstances, but our collaboration was strong enough to successfully convey our team's ideas to the public.

The feedback we received from Dr. Simone and Dr. Matt was positive, especially in regards to the presentation's design ( which I was responsible for). They suggested utilising a similar aesthetic impact for our website to "hook" the target audience in and raise their interest in the topic. Based on their feedback and on the progress shown in other groups' presentations, we identified our next steps:

Deciding how users get to the website ( qr codes? )

In depth research on role of human activity in introducing non native species in the marine environment

Website content and website design

16th of March - During consolidation week, Dr. Simone sent us our formative feedback following the presentation.

She has linked our project to many other themes we could explore and I will definitely spend some time researching each one of them. I tried to set up a Zoom call with my team members so we can allocate tasks between ourselves, but they have not been responsive. I understand them as our other modules are making it harder to organize our time.

Bibliography:

Gura, T. Citizen science: Amateur experts. Nature 496, 259–261 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nj7444-259a

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Innovators and Makers (9th - 23rd February 2022)

-An initial blog post detailing my initial thoughts and ideas on the module and introductory tasks-

9th of February - In today's first ECIP lecture, we were introduced to the brief for this module, which is to create an artefact concerning invasive species in the Solent Area. We are allowed to choose between a prototype app, a public installation or a series of printed materials; personally, I'm already leaning towards the idea of a digital platform as I think it's quite interactive but I might change my mind once I meet my team members and learn what courses they are from. We also got to take an Adobe Creative Type test, which tells you what type of creative you are according to your responses to a certain number of questions. My result was "Innovator" and here is an excerpt from my creative personality analysis:

" INNOVATORS tap into their greater potential when they learn to master the art of the follow-through. By finding joy in the “messy middle” of a venture—not just the excitement of the beginning or the satisfaction of reaching the finish line—you’ll become a true creative powerhouse."

From Adobe Creative Type Test

I definitely think moving forwards, learning how to navigate the confusing phases of this module ("the messy middle") will prove to be a challenge as invasive species are not a topic I'm familiar with or related in any matter to architecture as my degree. It is also worth noting that the Adobe test recommended that INNOVATORS and MAKERS work together, so I'm curious to find out if I will be paired up with the right personalities.

16th of February - In this week's lecture, Dr. Matt Smith guided us through his research project 'Puppet City' which considers how different societal groups interact with city space design. I enjoyed the fact that throughout his presentation, he constantly engaged our critical thinking by asking us thought provoking questions, such as how we might design safer spaces for children and our opinions on play as a beneficial activity. Learning about this project was quite insightful, not so much for the contents themselves, but rather for the dynamics that brought about its realisation. The way in which the scope was narrowed down to a specific objective ( to interrogate the use of play in urban design) has evidently offered the creator a solid starting point and has helped him in finding appropriate precedents for the projects. The fact he carried out this research with Guido Robazza, my past architecture tutor, has also given me a point of reference in terms of how I could use my specific creative field to respond to societal issues in unrelated fields.

Today I also got to meet one of my team members, even though the other 5 were not on the call. We both agreed on the possibility of our final artefact being a digital platform as we believe it could always be relevant and a catalyst for tangible change. Our team has many dreamers and only one maker; it will be interesting to see whether that really affects the way we collaborate and realise our ideas. In the meantime, I will reflect on these questions:

what could our digital platform be about in relation to invasive species?

how could we publicise it ?

how do we make it interactive?

do we have the skills to produce the prototype?

23rd of February - Today we had our first field trip to the Ankle Deep Studio in the Portsmouth Dockyard. Our group today was only three people and I am starting to get worried we might deal with a shortage of members. On the upside, I was happy to meet all the students from other creative disciplines as we rarely get to interact in our different courses. Our group was delegated to the Mast Pond site of the dockyard which, as Claire Sambrook interestingly shared with us, was used to store timbers to prevent them from seasoning unevenly or cracking before they were made into masts. That history account, along with the creeping algae we found on the pond, inspired us to start interpreting the brief from the perspective of humanity as an invasive species and how nature is fighting back against that phenomenon. As a group we decided to document this interaction through an underwater time lapse which we will set up in the following week. It is exciting we have made some progress towards our concept.