This project was all about improving communities within San Diego. We originally started out with an indiviual idea for each of our neighborhoods, but as the project continued, we chose with ideas would be best to persue and created groups based on interests and liking of the idea. We went into the community that we were studing and took observations, mainly focusing on the needs of the overall population. From there we formed brainstormed how to help or make progress of that need. Many professional urban planners came and presented to us to give us a good example of what we should be doing. Those same urban planners came to our presentations to critique our ideas and presentation overall. On top of the presentation, we made a fact sheet to put all of our research and plans on, and a documentary to show the process we with through. There were 6 people in my group, with all diffrent skills, and a lot to get done. Each person who's idea was choosen became the leader of that group and took on a lot of resbonsibility. I took on this leadership role. Although I was excited to see my question of "How might we generate a more inculsive feeling wihout destroying the culture/inner beauty of the community?", I definitely knew this role would be a challenge. I had to task people, and clarifying multiple questions, repeat myself a lot, etc. It gave me a little insight to how my teachers feel everyday. As the days continued and the project went on, I gained knowledge of how each of the people in my group work and their motivations. Understanding each group member really improved the quality of work day to day.
Seeing that we tried to tackle many problems within Ocean Beach to advocate for everyone, we had to do a lot of research for all the different aspects of our plan. Most of our research for the logistics came from places where our plan or something similar has worked or didn't work and basically the takeaways from each project. For the shuttles we looked into Crested Butte, Colorado, which has a free shuttle bus to mainly transport tourists around Colorado. Howard Blackson suggested for that we look into a "Complete Street" for our idea of Newport Ave. www.dot.ca.gov/transplanning/ocp/complete-streets.html This link gave us some good information about what a complete street is and how they are being implemented all around. A complete street provides safety for all users which is ultimtaley the goal of any street, but the complete street lays it out in a very nice format to ensure that safety and comfort feeling. Something I find very convincing of why a complete street or completely pedestrianizing a street would be good, is that it improves the health and actitiy of people in that community because they feel safe enough to bike or walk without the worry of cars.
When we presented to the experts, we were given many helpful pieces of critiqe on hwo we could logistically fulfill our idea. One idea was to help provide for homeless or at least less fortunate by making affordable housing with limited space, but at least have a bed and a basic shelter. I feel like that would benefit the homeless that genuinely are trying to pick themselves back up again, rather then our idea of the homeless help center, which labels them as homeless and not much effort from them is put in to pick themselves up. Another piece of critique we got was to put more viuals and maps of our plan, so they can see the overall Ocean Beach and where we hope to input these ideas. I wish we would've had more time in between presentations, rather than a day, to improve and maybe even take some of the ideas and incorporate them.
My group is made up of mostly outgoing people. I thought this would cause problems because only one person can really be the leader and I felt liked there might be some challenges with accepting the jobs they would be assigned. It turns out that everyone was mostly fine except one member who wanted to take on all of the tech projects. Considering this was a very heavy tech project, we knew we would have to split up the tech and give the resonsibility of editing the documentary to a different member. There were some problems with this because originally the tech knowledgable member would take on the documentary. Unfortunately, a lot of photoshop tasks came up, and we had more people knowledgeabel with iMovie than photoshop, so not everyone got the job of their choice, but everyone got a job that I knew they could succeed in. After explaining this statement to the members who were arguing about the responsibilities, I think everything made a turn for the better.
Overall, I learned a lot from this project. I took away things from my gorup members, my teachers, the experts that came to present to us, and especially how I handled the problems that came about within the project. The role I took on was not something I'm used to, but I feel I accomplished a lot about learned a lot about what I am capable of doing. Each day was something different with my group, which made it even more challenging to keep up with all the progress or even set backs we had. My biggest take away from being the leader is to have confidence in your group members, even when you have no faith in them at all. Just when I thought that our whole project was going horrible and no one in my group was completing anything they said they would, one of my group members comes up with a beautiful photoshopped layout of our plan, another group member creates a lovely presentation script, another makes a informative and artistic fact sheet, and two others present an inspiring documentary. It was amazing to see all the progress of something that just started as my personal question of how might we improve the community I call home. One of my favorite experiences was being told that our presentation was one of the best. It goes to show that a random group of classmates can really come together and produce a passionate project.
Something I really liked about this project was how the groups were developed. We were anonynomously given many indiviual papers with a set of skills and how you would rank yourself on those skills. We looked at whihc skill set would balance out our skill set and form groups based on that. However, once the leaders were announced, they were told to use the skills sets and pick our groups. This didn't work out that well because I had a lot of people running up to ask to be in my group, which was a very stressful experience for me. Otherwise, that process worked very well to develop unique and balanced groups.