Please use this space to converse about your group projects.
1. Share your idea.
2. Discuss.
3. Search out team members if you do not have one(s).
My Best,
Ashley
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This blog has been created as a forum for students at the University of Michigan enrolled in a course titled "Technology and The Environment", designed by Professor Joe Trumpey for the School of Art and Design. This section is lead by graduate student instructor Ashley L. Lieber
16 comments:
Alyssa Chambo and I are organizing a benefit concert for an environmental cause we have not yet determined. It will likely be held at the Neutral Zone Teen Center, but my backup plan is to contact the authorities at the Michigan League.
If the show were to be held at the Neutral Zone, Alyssa and I would be working in cooperation with the Green Group, a teen group devoted to environmental activism.
Ideally, this show would take place before the winter semester, but Professor Trumpey has made it clear that we shouldn't get our hopes up. He seems fine with the concert occurring next semester.
(But let it be known that I'm not entirely willing to settle for that.)
Alyssa and I were working with three other students, but I believe that we have two completely separate sets of goals and ideas. We may disband and only work with the Green Group—there would be enough people to help us organize this show in a timely fashion.
Eleanor Schmitt
For my project I am working with Aylssa Ackerman, Grace Hanson, and Jenn Weber. We have slightly revised our goal for this project form integrating an elementary curriculum to an all grades k-5 event held at Matthaei Botanical Gardens. We have been in touch with Bob Grese from the school of natural resources and the environment. He is in charge of Botanical Gardens and the Arb.
This event will be held in the main building and include a series of booths/tables to focus on four main fields of environmental sustainability: Water, Recycling, Localizing, and Energy. Each of these fields will have about three different tables to them, each focusing on a different aspect of the field. There will be numerous events for the kids and their parents to participate in, along with informational poster boards, pamphlets to view and read. Our goals is to use these materials as a way for children to learn about the environment, the state that it is in, and the ways in which they, themselves, can change their habits to sustain the environment.
We also plan to have a speaker come to do a presentation in the auditorium. We have not have not yet figured out whom we would like to speak, but we have narrowed it down to a couple people.
This event is planned to last about 6 hours and will be held sometime in December. Since it is so long, we are looking into providing a Michigan Lunch. This is a lunch produced locally and organically. We aren’t sure the costs yet or who to exactly contact, but we thought it would be a neat idea.
Other than that, we plan to take a trip ASAP to the Botanical Gardens to view the rooms, and individually, we will each make a trip out to a place involving one of the four fields we are presenting. I am Recycling, Aylssa is Localizing, Jenn is Energy, and Grace is Water. Thus, we are going to use these places as our field research projects.
I am working with Jenn, Lindsey, and Grace to put on an event (as previously stated by lindsey) at the botanical gardens in Ann Arbor. We have contacted the director of the gardens and plan to take a trip over there to check it out.
Between the four of us, we are covering buying locally which will include information on food and hopefully include an appearance from a local farmer, recycling- information about what you can and cant recycle, how to do it, why it is important, water-use, conservation, and energy, turning off the lights, carbon footprints, etc.
We will have booths and hopefully free things such as stickers, buttons, and information, as well as guests from local environmental groups and facilities.
We will need help running the booths if anyone has interest in spending some time at the gardens helping to educate elementary aged kids!
Sam Orshan, Alana Nedelman and Carin Alpert and I are all working together for our group project. We have decided after thinking about some of the themes that have been discussed during lecture that recycling is something that hits very close to home. We thought it could be interesting to start recycling on a regular basis and between the four of us hopefully collect a wide range of objects. After collecting these materials, we want to somehow create an installation using these materials and install it in a specific area on campus. Originally, the arboretum would be our top choice in a place to display our work. We thought the notion of displaying our recyclables in such a pristine and natural area where art usually isn’t displayed would serve as an interesting contrast. We also are thinking of taking the objects themselves and manipulating them to transform into a different object. If we did do this we would also install the piece. We are wary of the amount of collecting and recycling we have to do, and are also going to take into consideration the types of objects we are using and where and who this installation will be seen by.
Emma Bumstead, Marcia Kosin and I were thinking about labeling trees in the Diag with their English and Latin names. We were going to post the plaque in the ground below the tree so that everyone would be able to tell what it is. We also would make brochures and have a little "cheat sheet" that tells you how to identify a few of the more common trees in Michigan and how we were able to identify the trees in the Diag. To do this, we would need to talk with the grounds management at U of M. We still need to verify the idea with Professor Trumpey.
I am working with Erica Mouns, Erin Stroble, Audrey Trent and Kelsey Sovereign. We are all interested in the food industry so for our group project all of us are researching where local Ann Arbor restaurants get a lot of their food items. We are going to look at all the food groups and ask them where we get their meats, cheeses, dairy, fruits and vegetables etc or any other information they give us. With this information we are going to inform the public by creating a food review magazine that will include all of the restaurants that we researched ranging from different types of food as well as different locations on this Ann Arbor campus. We hope to even have small advertisements in the magazine and display them at hotel on campus.
Erica Mouns
Section 5
I am in a group with Jayme. Her post basically describes what our group project will be. One of the problems we are having is deciding how to print our magazine. We are thinking about printing around fifteen copies in color and then a mass amount in black and white which would be distributed in hotels on campus and in the union or other places around Ann Arbor. We will look into Kinko's and Dollar Bill Printing to see which will be the cheapest to print our project.
Michelle K, Louise C and I, as a group, decided to research about "green buildings" or building sustainability. As long as civilization exists, people will keep building structures that will last for a long period of time; China is where more than 50% of construction is happening. With all these in mind, we are interested in knowing more about how architecture has impacts on environment and our response to them. For example, technology has enabled to construct buildings with more energy-efficient materials such as insulation walls that would reduce energy use. This, in fact, is in practice, and it is called, "LEED" (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).
To get a profound knowledge of the green buildings, we will meet with either a professor or a PhD candidate from Taubman College of Architecture to discuss building sustainability, and how U of M responds to it. This also includes a short trip to Dana Hall, which is a home to School of Natural Resources and Environment. One possible idea is to visit every building on campus and observe its energy sustainability.
In addition, we will create either a model or a book about the topic and if time allows, bumper stickers.
For a book, it would contain information about the green buildings and building sustainability on campus. Possible experiment can be done to measure the amount of natural light in various places or to investigate the type of windows in buildings.
For my group project I am working with Sam Hanson, Matt Hallock and Ben English. We plan on going around to all of the most popular eateries in Ann Arbor and finding out where they purchase their beef from. This will hopefully include the University dining halls as well. Once we've narrowed the location down all the way to the source, or as close as we can get, we are planning on making some kind of flow chart showing not only locations that the local beef is coming from, but prices, distance traveled from the farm to the plate, etc. Anything interesting we can find out. The end result should be an aesthetically pleasing chart (either online, as a big poster, or individual hand outs) that viewers can easily read and gain valuable knowledge from. Our target audience is mostly fellow students, but we plan on including restaurants from all over Ann Arbor in all price ranges to show a comparison.
The reason we hope to appeal to students on this issue is because students are the people who are ready and willing to care about issues and get involved in order to instigate some kind of change, if desired. Students are motivated. For example, in the past when students realized they didn't approve of something the University was supporting (Nike shoes and Coca Cola) they used their power in numbers to make a successful change. The same thing could potentially happen with our project, or could at least begin brewing in the minds of students.
Maggie Baczewski
ADP III
Laura Thompson, two LSA students and I are organizing a tree planting through an organization called Global ReLeaf. The organization will pay for half the cost of a neighborhood tree planting if we submit a proposal to be approved. Unfortunately we missed the deadline for a fall tree planting so we will have to wait until the spring to do it.
Also, Global ReLeaf's website provides information on how to plant a tree so we thought about making a promotional video for their website and submitting it to them.
After Professor Trumpey told us planting trees could add to local warming we've been doubting our project idea. We are doing to research to make our own opinions.
Rachel McGuffin
My group is Suzi Chou, Maida Zelda, Jenny Yan, and Peter Kim. It’s a rather large group but it’s effective for the expansive project we want to do. When brainstorming what irked us about technology and environment the most, what we most wanted to change, every issue seemed just as important. The issue that we kept coming back to was the lack of awareness. What about all the students on campus who weren’t taking Joe Trumpey’s lecture? They deserve to know what’s going on in our world. The problem then becomes how to reach the most people on the most personal level, and doing it in an eco-friendly way. At first we wanted to ‘shop-drop’ and change the labels of commonly used animal products and un-fair trade items to be more honest. We came to realize that was just proliferating more materials and perhaps the throwing away of those items once they were discovered. Seeing as we didn’t want an idiosyncratic project we devised a new root. There are information stations in every classroom on campus; a place every student will walk in and their desk is facing toward. The chalkboard (or white board) is the perfect medium to reach many students simply an unobtrusively. What we will now do is gather a substantial amount of statistics that we think are most important to know. Prepare a a list for the 5 directors and whoever we convince to help us and write on the chalk board one statistic (which we will cite to lend us credibility) and at the end of class, if the board has been used, rewrite the statistic. We will take a day out of the schedule to ask the teacher permission and the class rooms around it to give this little fact to the community. We will also ask friends on different campuses and different states to do the same. We will most likely end up developing an email list or a website to fuel our progress. Then we will observe the results. See if it is effective or not. In addition we want to reserve a day at the diag where we will walk up to students ask if they know so and so fact. Regardless of the answer we will say “Good, I just wanted you to know” and move on to the next person. We will videotape the encounters and use them for our creative project, juxtaposed to our handwritten messages. Our aim is not to convince anyone of what they should do or what they should think about the situation. We just want the information out there to see what the public will or will not do. This is a very hands on project, but relative to a person’s life it won’t take up very much time. It’s about getting many people to do just a little and seeing a big effect.
Rachel McGuffin
Me and my droogs, Amy, Beth and...I forget the other one's name are puttin' on a bake sale of epic proportions. Each of our products will be labeled with a bitty map showing where each ingredient came came from. We're gonna make it sweet, you better believe it. Increase fuckin' awareness, we will! Our profits will go to some awesome cause. Hoooopeefully we can do this in Angell Hall, where all the less informed non-art kids attend their boring academic classes like english and classic civ. Delicious? You better believe it!
Carolyn Nowak!!!!!!!
Just to add on to Tae’s post--we are also thinking of creating a website (or some other medium that can be accessed globally) in order to spread knowledge about the green building effort. It’s not enough for designers to think green ideas when the average human won’t implement them because they don’t understand the benefits.
-Louise C.
For our group project we will be working with local eateries in Ann Arbor and surrounding areas to find out where they get their meat products from. We anticipate problems with higher scale restaurants that perhaps may not want us to know that they get their meat from lower end establishments. As Kelsie stated above we will work on gathering information about where the meat comes from (local or imported), how far it has traveled if it has been shipped in, time elapse from slaughter to plate, and several other conditions.
In essence we will be looking into if in fact the more expensive restaurants are indeed implicating better food practices, or if they are solely basing their prestige on the cooks ability to prepare the same food used in lower end establishments. Also looking into how much more expensive it is to eat locally verses the mass produced, imported alternatives.
For our group project, we are creating an installation using recycled materials. Ideally, we were thinking of constructing this installation in the Arb. We thought there would be a way would could create something really beautiful and interesting with these materials and make a statement by putting the installation in a natural environment.
We spoke to Joe Trumpey, and he said it was a great idea but we just had to make sure we had enough materials.
My group is Meredith Kramer, Alana Nedelman, karin, and Samantha Orshan. We hope to finisht his project in the fall, ideally around thanksgiving. We want to avoid too much snow if possible.
-Samantha Orshan
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