WiP Project Blog/Reflection

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Above are pictures of my group’s homelessness poster board before the presentation. Overall, the presentation was better than I expected. I was worried about our poster not being colorful enough or me not remembering what I researched. When it came time, I was successful in presenting the board. I did mess up a couple of times, but I don’t believe it took away from my presentation. It wasn’t the greatest but it surely wasn’t the worst. This was my favorite part because first off, I didn’t need to present, and secondly I enjoyed looking at everyone’s different boards. It was nice to see how my colleagues and friends presented their boards and how they viewed their WiP. For instance, I looked at a crime, education, and a homelessness presentation. I was glad to look at another board that was also doing homelessness because it was interesting to spot the similarities and differences in our solutions. Furthermore, it was interesting to spot how some of the WiP’s solutions tied with other WiP. For example, the crime presenters talked about there must be better citizenship of the Austin residents to lower crime, and in our solutions we relied heavily on citizenship, too. It got me wondering, could our solutions to homelessness have positive and/or negative affects on other problems? 

Brainstorming Reflection

The brainstorming part of the project is always one of the hardest parts next to research in my opinion. This is a link to our brainstorming part ( brainstorming-with-qs ). It is the time to gather all the research that we have individually conducted and to figure some sort of common theme and conclusion that we all can agree on. Unfortunately, we had some drawbacks when we were researching because some of my group members were unable to find interviewees until late this week. Thankfully, we were able to come up with a way to present our information (this could always change, though). We were thinking of a tri-fold poster including our solution and riddled with pictures all around and a laptop in the middle setup so it goes through “quick facts” passers-by can glance at. We have all our research together, and now the biggest question is, “what is the answer to our problem?”. This answer doesn’t appear in one meeting, so we will be meeting throughout the weeks until we have a final conclusion.

Interview Reflection

I was lucky enough to have my interviewee send their answers to my questions this past week (document is here: wip-interview ). I was trying to contact somebody who worked for a homeless shelter such as a director, but unfortunately, they were not available. However, I was able to contact a volunteer for a homeless shelter. In short, my interviewee said that homeless, like poverty, is a systematic problem in Austin. They bring up how the economy, low wages, and drug and substance abuse further increases the problem of homelessness. My interviewee brings up that there are some people that want homeless arrested or moved, and that really confused me. It sounds like a “out of sight out of mind” mentality which doesn’t solve anything. If you arrest them, jails become more overcrowded for no good reason. There is no place to just move an entire community of people who need help. It’s just wrong.

Dr. Kennedy Presentation

Overall, Kennedy’s presentation took me for a surprise on different levels. What really amazed me was when he said that there are around 6900 different spoken languages and that photography was a universal language ( I thought only math was a universal language ). In the beginning of the presentation, I didn’t know where or how he was going to relate photography to wicked problems. He asked us what was the first question that we ask ourselves when we look at a photo, to which he answered with, “What am I looking at?”. To me, this was what he was trying to get through to us. Wicked problems does not appear the same to every individual. For example, not everyone is going to agree that one wicked problem is more severe than the other. Everyone has different perspectives.

Concept Map

This last week my group explored a wicked problem in Austin. My group decided to focus on homelessness, and I created a visual representation to help make sense of the system that we are exploring concept-map .

Here is a explanation of what I created:

I first started with what we are exploring, homelessness, and then divided it into three parts, Government, Demographics, and Businesses. Beneath each subheading I put a general term that our group might be focusing on. The words with black lines are connected directly to the subheading; for example, under ‘Organization’ I put ‘Businesses’ and ‘Charities’. Underneath those are general ideas that specify the topic. Words that are connected by red lines are ideas that are not under the same subheading but can be linked together. For instance, charities and citizens are not under the same subheading but can be linked together by showing how many people participate in volunteering or giving to charities.

 

Week 4 Reflection

In my three hour course, we are given a question and collaborate together to give solutions to the question, and the class usually gives different responses. For example, our topic at the moment is food security, and we saw a documentary about different families and their problems they struggle with. What I took from this video was that problems like these do not have simple solutions. Everything is connected, and when one thing changes, it creates a “domino effect”. So in my group, I can attempt to see the flaws we have in our group project and help contribute to find ways to solve these problems and also see what is affected by our actions.

Austin CAN Presentation Sept. 12

Overall the presentation was very interesting and informative to show what CAN does and what they have accomplished. Raul Alvarez, the speaker, did very good in presenting his information. The most interesting thing for me was that although they had so much progress in many of their goals, but 4 of the 5 basic needs indicators worsened these past years. It took me by surprise to how much progress one can have but fall in other places. It is important to look at wicked problems locally because it shows how much work our city actually needs. Many places around the world have similar problems, so if we are able to fix our own problems, we may use our knowledge to help others.

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