Baby Steps!

October 4th, 2012, 2:30 pm

Every week that goes by becomes more and more challenging with new issues to overcome around every corner. We started out the week by sitting down and brainstorming to narrow down our ideas for our tour of the city.

At first, instead of narrowing down our ideas, brainstorming broadened them. We threw out any idea that came into our heads, and as silly as some were, we considered all of them. We decided to limit our ideas to family friendly ones, because there is already a pull to the downtown area for the young adults with the large nightlife. After a bit of research and heavy brainstorming, we came up with a feasible idea we could all agree on: a tour showing and educating the public on the invasive species that have moved into Windsor and the Detroit River. We wish to include research on plants, grass, trees, birds, insects, fish and other water-life. The tour could include places along the riverfront, parks near the downtown core and the plants brought in to decorate the streets. We aim to focus on what the native species are versus the invasive species. We will attempt to figure out if these invasive species were placed here intentionally or unintentionally (travelled here on their own). If the invasive species were put here intentionally, then why? Or, was there something else that could have been put in its place? These are questions we hope to solve in our research over the next few weeks. We plan to contact Science City, GLIER, and local elementary schools to see if they have thoughts on our idea. Ideally we would like this to possibly be used as a science class field trip, or a family day adventure to educate people on the city they live in. We have plans to look into perhaps making a website to advertise the tour, and making brochures either printed versions, printable online versions, or both.

As we mentioned last week, we have researched other city’s tour booklets and ideas. Recently we are reading about “psychogeography” to see if it is something we can incorporate into our tour. Psychogeography is the study of the laws and effects of the geographical environment, on the emotions and behaviours of individuals. We believe this is an interesting way to look at the simple idea of a tour, and that we can use it to perhaps force people off their normal paths and discover new things in Windsor!

Some definitions of Psychogeography by Guy Debord, who defined the term.

There is very exciting progress to be made in the next few weeks coming up! Stay tuned!

Tweet

Experiments with Megaphones are MEGAFUN!

June 8th, 2010, 3:40 pm

Utilizing ideas and discussions from our previous class we hit the streets with homemade megaphones. Our first destination was Huron Church Road.  The six of us started shouting messages at the traffic such as, “Keep it Down”, “You’re too Loud”, and other such statements.  Our dialogue with the traffic was greeted by honks and shouting.  How ironic.  We found it interesting how many passers-by engaged with us, without knowing what our cause was.  We felt that this exemplified how readily people are influenced whether that be positively or negatively.

From there we headed to the riverfront with our megaphones and spoke with the trees and the Detroit River.  We apologized to the trees and the water for our negligence, for our carelessness and ignorance. After that we put the megaphones into the trees to symbolically give them a voice. We also shouted in the megaphones to the Ambassador Bridge traffic for what it embodies (capitalism, pollution, etc.).  This exercise gave us some further ideas that we will be carrying out for the remainder of the semester.

Taylor conversing with the trees

Are you listening

Conversing with the trees using a megaphone

Conversing with transport using megaphones

Tweet