Galley Interviews/ Research

Today during our studio period my group (Kelly and Sam) and I went to the Galley to observe the function of the space while it was in between meal times and we could look clearly. We also went to interview workers and fellow students. To see more in depth notes on the interviews and to see what our group is doing as a whole our group blog is http://art347galleyefficiencypproject.blogspot.com/ .

At first we observed the space and seating arrangements. We addressed which spaces were being used to the best of their ability and which were not and what could be done. We looked at the seating at both levels and noticed that they have been attempting to improve the flow of the dining area.
Below is an image from the second level of the main seating area. This shows how they broke up the space between the long tables. We thought that if extra seats were just stacked to the side this would allow students to create more sitting for themselves; similar to what happens in the buffet style dining halls.

After observing the area we went to interview the workers. We were able to interview an adult cashier, two adults who worked in different food areas, and a student worker. They all gave us their options of what the Galley is like during peak times, what they feel the problems are and what they feel should be done. Most of them mentioned the confusion between the lunch and dinner combos, when meals start and meal allotment. They all brought different thoughts and problems to our attention, like how the handicap have to enter. This allowed us to see how all of these different ideas influence the problem of efficiency. 

We attempted to talk to a manager that was on shift but she did not at all seem interested in speaking with us. It seemed like she felt threatened even after we explained that we just wanted feedback for a class project. It reminded me of the CEO story in our Theory U book because it seemed like she did not want to acknowledge change or that anything was wrong.

After looking over all of the different aspects of problems we decided to focus on the communication between the student and the workers. Students often ask the workers questions about the meal plan when the screens are not working or if they are confused. The workers, having no signage facing them have trouble if they are able to answer the question at all. This leads to further confusion and a hold up in line. We hope to help the students and workers understand the meal plan system better. This may lead to an overall better experience in the Galley with faster moving lines. 

Theory U: Chapters 6-9

Chapter 6

This chapter discussed ontological and epistemological groundings and that to do this we need to welcome the phenomenon of emergence and accept the idea that "all systems and knowledge are situated in context" (embeddedness). The author goes on to discuss the views of Nietzsche; that science should be viewed like an artist and that scientific investigation should be applied to ideas like the creative process. I thought that this was an interesting idea and that it is something we are already do through user research we conduct. In the last section he talked about the knowing of the heart- love. It was stated that love is the "deepest knowledge of things". I disagreed with this statement because while it can be true; the thing you love, you probably have a deep knowledge about. It does not go the other way; I have a deep knowledge on a topic, does not mean I love it.

Chapter 7

In chapter seven the main idea was a threshold and overcoming it. Overcoming it is a similar process for all systems; realizing our current (incorrect) ways and redirecting our attention. The author used the example of the population's different reactions to 9/11. He stated that the key to high performance in rapidly changing environments is attending to a situation from a different place. I agree with this completely because falling on old habits really is not getting us anywhere.

Chapter 8

The author makes the case that to move forward we must acknowledge and move passed this idea of downloading because all it does is make us repeat the past. In this chapter there was a short story about a man borrowing a hammer from his neighbor, it showed the reader how we can get into our own head and create things that are not true. I found this story to be very true because I often find myself creating situations in my head and assuming how people may act. The chapter continued with a story about a health care company and how the past CEOs influenced the company's culture and created "learning disabilities". These anecdotes show how deep rooted the idea of downloading can be and how powerfully it can effect things.

Chapter 9

Chapter nine was all about seeing and becoming aware of the reality around you. To shift from downloading to really seeing one must,1) clarify question and intent, 2) move into the contexts that matter, 3) suspend judgement and connect to wonder and set up a dialogue. One of the sections that I found interesting was the second section because it discussed how important it is to do the "legwork" because if it were to be outsourced it would lead to a disconnect in the work. The final section of the chapter is a study of the patient physician dialogue forum. At this forum the four levels of this type of dialogue was decided; as the levels continued they became more abstract. I am not sure if I agree with the last level of Self Transforming presence.

Poster write up

Below is the paragraph that Kym created to sum up our poster project:



We came up with a poster that would allow observers to interact with the poster

by filling out what their peace is, along with a Peace Campaign. We also held

an event that allowed people to fill out their own banner piece which was to be

strung up like a Tibetan peace banner. Just the amount of anonymous, personal

answers given on the banner pieces shows that the Peace Campaign was a

success. It gives a new way of looking at peace by seeing what others value that

you might take for granted.

Theory U: Chapters 2- 5

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 starts with discussing the different levels of change; from the shallowest- re-acting to the deepest- re-framing and re-generating. I found it interesting that each level further the outcome creation became more profound. Then the author gives the example of the company Xerox, which is something we had started to discuss in class. Xerox had created many great idea but they became successful at the hands of other companies like Apple because of their narrow focus on copiers. This led him to explain thinking on a deeper level, which involved observing for a long time, then retreating and reflecting, then acting in an instant. He compared it to painters who stare at something forever before painting. I can relate to this thinking because this is how I feel before coming up with the idea that I base a project on. The chapter closes with the enemies of open mind, heart and will. The enemy of open mind is the voice of judgement. The enemy of open heart is voice of cynicism. The enemy of open will is the voice of fear.

Chapter 3

This chapter stated several dimensions for how to approach change. First was reacting with is the most common way, which deals with habits and routines. The second is re-designing which works on changing the underlying structure and process. The third way is reframing which is changing patterns of thought. The third level is what us as humans need to work towards because thinking in the past will not solve all challenges. Another section that I agreed with is that as humans we create organizations and how they work. Once we set all the rules we become trapped by them and we blame what we made for our problems. This is something that we can fix if we look through it all more clearly.

Chapter 4

The chapter starts with the 3 types of complexity that impact challenges. Dynamic complexity is a systematic distance or delay between cause and effect in space or time. Social complexity is the product of diverse interests and worldviews among stakeholders. I found his examples of global warming and the CO2 emissions treaty to be very helpful in explaining these concepts. I also found it very frustrating that we have not signed the CO2 emissions treaty. The last one mentioned is emerging complexity which is characterized by disruptive change where the solution is unknown. He discussed again how we have moved from result focused to process focused to source focused. I think this progression is interesting because we have been "process based" for most of my life, so morphing to something new is exciting.

Chapter 5

One of the main parts of this chapter is the driving forces of this revolution that is rising from this conflict. The first force he mentions is the civil societies and NGOs and how they have effected history. I thought this was fascinating because we have discussed the fairly recent growth of NGOs but I did not realize their effect on history. The second force is the rise of the creative class and how it has created a large amount of today's economic development. I found this section exciting because I feel that I am apart of this growing group. The third section is spirituality which he describes as "source of creativity (distinct from religion)". Near the end of the chapter Otto further explained Society's Blind Spot. An interesting comment he made was that we see in special interest groups while we need what we lack which is cross-sector action groups.

"To discover this knowledge, we must trust our own senses, experiences, and insights --without having a clue where that journey will lead next"

Week 4: part 2

Event
Yesterday we held our event in the art building lobby. I was able to get about half of our total triangles from this event. I approached both people I knew and people I did not. I was selective about the people I choose and I think this is why it was such a positive experience overall. For example, I was not trying to stop students who needed to be in class in 2 minutes. I asked people who were waiting in the lobby for class or who were early and the occasional faculty member. I asked them if they could fill this sentence out for a project I am doing. If they asked, I explain further about the banner and the  peace project as a whole.

Failures/ things to learn from

• We ended up sort of dropped the hashtag social media side of it, we did this because we realized that we were able to get better/truer responses if we explained it as anonymous than trying to push a hashtag. People did not think as hard about it and it took less time. They were also less likely to post what "friends wanted to see" with the hastag dropped
• The original problem of people not wanting to rip our poster was solved 

Construction of Banner

Wednesday night after the event and any stragglers gave us the triangles we started to construct the banner. To attach the pieces to the string we just put small slits into the triangle above the sentence then threaded the string through.

The banner overall ended up being a lot larger than we planned on it being which just makes its presence as a whole, better and more noticeable.

For the critique we hung the banner in the lab so everyone could see it and anyone who was in class that participated could find their own triangle. Below are photos of the posters we hung during the critique. They were the posters that hung in the art building stairwell and were the ones we were able to put the marker next to. We were excited to see that they were filled out and on top of that the poster that was written in originally, someone wrote on the side what they felt. Because of all the participation we did not want to separate the triangles to put on the banner so we decided to look at the posters as a separate entity. 

Kym and I felt that even though there was some failures we felt the project as a whole and the mission of spreading peaceful thoughts was accomplished and we are hopeful that we can hang the banner in the lobby so more participates can see it. 

Theory: U (Foreward - p25)

Reflection

I found the reading as a whole very intriguing. The section about the two reactions to breakdown really struck a cord with me because that is what is seen in the media today, muddlers and people attempting to fight back. The author's Third view makes a lot of sense, humans as a species cannot continue to do what we are doing. Moving forward and thinking/learning in the future seems to be an interesting approach because the author is right in saying that looking to the past does not solve present and future challenges. I also agreed with his idea that a leader is not necessarily always the person in charge. In the introduction, a few of the concepts were a little difficult to grasp but I know they will be covered in further detail in later readings. The idea of figuring out your blind spot and where you operate from makes sense. It seems to be along the similar lines of the phrase "where you are coming from" just with an even deeper meaning. The section that was most interesting to me was when he described the Structure of our attention and the 4 basic types of listening. The way he gave examples assisted in explaining the concept and its differences.

Week 4

After researching Tibetan prayer/peace flags we found that there is mainly 5 colors that the flag can be: blue, red, yellow, white or green. Below is one of the pictures we found in a google image search and the other is a screenshot of a section of the image search to show how prominent the colors are. 

After seeing these colors and finding that there is 5, we made room for five little flags on our poster. 

We also continued to refine the bottom bullet since we now have the real date for our facebook event.

We decided to print four posters to place around campus to promote our event. We feel they are more for awareness since we are not sure how many people will actually tear it off.

Below is a screenshot of the Facebook event. We updated the cover photo once we printed off a page of triangles and the posters today. 

Week3 - pre-crit and progress

Kym and I made a few adjustments to the poster for the pre-critique. To make the bottom paragraph more readable we decided on the wording of bullet points. Below is the 13x 19 poster that was printed and a close up of the change made from the last post.

Once we decided on the text we felt that it still was not enough to get the viewer to look. To solve this we found our action words and made them bold and all caps so they would jump out at the viewer and they could get the message quickly. 

During the pre-critique we received a lot of feedback about the triangles and what to do instead. Once we explained our ideas about the banner and that the majority of the pieces will be given out at the event it sort of cleared the air. Our peers overall enjoy the color and typography of the poster.

We did receive comments that it seemed small (because of how we cut it with the bottom) and Kym and I completely agreed. We had the document size a lot larger before we learned that the poster contest asked for it to be 13x19. For promoting the event and actually executing it, the poster size will be larger.

After explaining the idea of the banners and how they are like the Tibetan Peace flags we were given the suggestion to make the triangles different colors and we plan to pursue that idea. 

We also debated whether the text needed to be filled in or not on the top section of the poster. We decided since we are printing 4 poster to promote, 2 will had writing, 2 will not. 

Week 3- progress

To continue working on the project, I brainstormed other ways to gain people's attention to actually do the tearing off action. I thought of other shapes that would set it apart from the rest. I came up with a triangle as something different and it morphed into triangles that could create a banner. Below is an the screenshot of it in illustrator of the change and my original sketch of the idea.

We feel that this will be more engaging and encourage the audience to actually participate. 

Below is an example of a pdf we may make available to  the public on our facebook event.

Week 2B: Online Survey

After deciding on our idea and how we planned to approach the survey, that night Kym and I put together a survey on Survey Monkey. Below are some screenshots of the question creation progress on the site.

The questions we included were geared towards helping us understand how to carry out this project more than asking them about concepts. First we asked ourselves what we wanted to know. Examples of this are,

Where should we put these posters on campus?

what social media outlets to do you use?

what makes you participate and interact with things on campus? 

We were able to keep the survey open for a little over 24 hours and we received 24 responses. To receive these responses Kym and I posted links to the survey to our Facebook accounts and my twitter account. 

SurveyMonkey had an analyze results section. We took the graphs/ questions from there to create our results document. We felt the graphs visualized some of the results very well for certain questions, while for written questions we listed top results we plan to act on. 

Below are screenshots of the ai document.  

The results for the location questions did not surprise us at all. It supported our thoughts, as students, of where we look.

This helps us decide where to put our posters to get the most views from the student body and community.

We feel that the results of the eye catching aspects question support our poster design. The large swatch of color and minimal (but large) text will set us apart from the busy/ small campus posters it will compete with.








Our results show that if there is something to rip off, that can be relevant to the viewer, they will most likely participate.





It was encouraging to see the responses on the positive end of the promoting spectrum and that they would be truthful.

Kym and I were not surprised to see Facebook take the number one spot. We were surprised to see that twitter did not even place. We contribute this to multiple things

• the phrasing of the question
• twitter does not have the ability to create photo albums
• many parents/family do not have twitter or follow their children

If we were to rephrase this we might have including something about, how often do you retweet or be apart of a cause/movement within social media, through which outlets?

Comedy and Entertaining were the first and second things shared most followed by helping with a goo cause. It was nice to see that not come in last.

We are also still working on the best wording to engage the viewer. To the left is another version of the poster with slightly different wording. 

Week 2A

During class today Kym and I decided to combine our research and ideas to create one poster. We had multiple ideas during discussion, at first they centered around education and how that leads to a peaceful future. We felt that this topic became difficult, to be able to assume what certain countries had. We reflected on discussions from class and I thought of when we compared our backgrounds and what we or others consider to be peace is very different.

This is how we came up with the rough idea for our poster. (pictured below) The overall poster has part of the saying on it and then the rest has been"written" in. At the bottom it says "spread peaceful thoughts" and we may included other directions there too. The white section ideally would be tearable so the viewer can take a mini poster of their own to right on and post somewhere.

This would carry into the second part of this project where we could create an twitter account or hashtag to send the pictures to. Would could also post the slips (pdf) somewhere so they could be printed elsewhere besides campus. 

We are going to reword the saying a little more so it flows and conduct a survey on what engages people to look at posters on campus.

Week 1

Peace Poster Research

 To start my research I tried to look up other posters on the topic of peace, much of what I found seemed to be done by children and included symbols of the world (globe), a dove and the peace sign used in many combinations. Blue, being a calming color was also used often.
While when I look into the visuals about human rights(also mentioned in the creative brief) they have more depth of meaning to them, it almost seems as if peace is such a broad concept that it become diluted visually.

I feel that peace deserves more of a focus, but it needs to be specific in a way, or find a way to engage with or interact with the viewer.

To find more examples historically I looked towards propaganda.

Propaganda is a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of a population toward some cause or position. (Wikipedia Definition)

The above definition perfectly describes our goals for this competition, to influence a movement towards peace. Propaganda also has a negative connotation because of movements throughout history that have manipulated the public with skewed facts. This is one of the reasons that I'd prefer to have as small of an amount of text as possible on my poster and that none of the text be "fact".
I feel that posters that have taken that approach have mislead the public so often that viewers today tend to ignore when they see something designed in a similar way.

Next I looked into cultural color associations since the poster will be for an international audience.

examples:
yellow- is the color of mourning in at least 2 countries and is also connected to sadness and jealousy
green- while in most places it means new life and beginnings and hope, in nations of Africa and South America it is connected to drug culture and corruption
Because of the olive branch symbol, olive green is considered a color of peace


 http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/a/bl_colorculture.htm
http://www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/cultural-color.html

What I found from these articles is that all colors have good and bad connotations, some worse than others, so as I design I need to be aware of my choices.


symbols of peace- white poppies, paper cranes
Fire is a symbol of peaces due to fire in temples.
Peace Flag- 7 stripes,(rainbow) with white letters spelling out peace

The human rights campaign has its own symbol that creates a hand and a simplified dove.


Shapes and Meanings

Circle- protection, completion, eternity, associated with sun and all the elements unified
Squares- order and stability
Triangle- the trinity, summoning, (pointed up) strong foundation, (pointed down) air and fire.



Definitions-
amity- a friendly relationship
Tranquility- state of being calm
repose- state of rest, or being kept in a particular place
quiescence- being still, marked by inactivity or repose
truce- an agreement between enemies to stop fighting for a certain amount of time
pacification- attempt to create and maintain peace.
     pacifist- someone who is against fighting and wars.




Interview Questions/Survey Research

overall question Ideas-
What is peace to you?
Is there a certain hue you think of?
What do you think of when I say human rights?
Is there a group you think of first?
In an ideal world _______
What can the everyday public do to help?
Do you pay attention to posters with facts?
Do you feel shapes have certain connotations?

Do you look at visuals posted around campus?
Why or why not?
What makes you look?
Where are you most likely to look at/for things on campus?

With the questions above (or refined ones) there are many ways my group can approach the public. I feel that choosing to survey and interview multiple ways will allow us to receive information from multiple demographics which will help us reach more people with our designs. I feel that going through social media (mainly Facebook) and interviewing a small group in person will allow us to receive more thorough explanations.

I researched online survey sites and found that both Survey Monkey and Question Pro are great options. Depending on our question types Question Pro may end up working best.