Week 13

This week, we continued working hard to make this event a success. Every group is working hard on their part of the project, such as wayfinding, advertising, social media, and web. Raechel and I have been busy taking photos to capture the process. So far things are running pretty smoothly in order to get this event up and running. The web group has announced that they need each group's toolkit by Tuesday, November 25, so that they can put them into the website. We are also working on the infographic to put into the toolkit as well. The Exchange online newspaper here on campus has agreed to write an article about our class and event in order to get the word out better, and I am working on writing an article for the student-run newspaper called the Snapper, which is supposed to be published in the December 2nd article. I am confident that the word will definitely be successfully spread throughout campus to encourage them to donate, and look forward to a larger-scale event in the near future.

Week 12

Our finalized logo and event name!

This week in class, we established what groups we would each be in for the remainder of the project, and I was chosen to be on the PR team with Raechel. We are in charge of writing an article for the Snapper, creating an infographic to convince other organizations to partner with us by giving reasons why they should. We are also going to create a tool kit to explain the process of how to go about implementing this event from the Public Relations perspective.  In addition, we are taking photos of everyone working hard in order to show the process of the project.

The entire class decided that an event covering the entire campus would require more alotted time than what we have left in the semester. Therefore, we agreed to host an event in the art building, where people could donate their leftover, unwanted art supplies on December 10. Then during the Spring 2015 semester the Graphic and Interactive Design Club that I am a part of could host an event so that we can sell the donated art supplies for a cheaper price to other art students.

The goal is that one day, after we have worked out the "bugs" during our mini-event, we can implement a campus-wide version of Good'Ville.

Off Campus Event: Coffee and Critique

Today Jamie, Raechel, and I went to the AIGA Coffee and Critique at the Midtown Scholar library in Harrisburg. There was a good group of working professionals and other students like us, who showed their work and received comments suggestions on their work. It was overall a great experience and the president of Central PA AIGA, Tim McKenna made us feel very welcome. We might go back to the next one in December to actually show our work.

Week 11

This week in class we began ideation for our next project, which is supposed to reach outside of the campus community. We went through several ideas, such as a Campus Goodwill, reaching out to spread awareness about childhood obesity, more animals in a designated area on campus where students could visit every day, and spread awareness that design majors do more than what other majors may think. We all eventually decided upon the idea of a Campus Goodwill, where students can drop off their unwanted items at the end of the semester so that other students can buy them for a reduced price. I feel that this would be very beneficial to the campus community, because personally I find it difficult to afford all of the things that I need for living in a college dorm.

We then broke into groups and researched different aspects of the project, such as potential partners, physical space, budget, and general research on other places doing something similar to our idea. My group researched potential partners, which includes the Goodwill, a few different churches, and the Costume Shop on Campus. None of the churches got back to us, and the costume shop has limited space already, so we are stuck on that.

Next we came up with a more established plan which would be to have a one time event, and to donate the rest that isn't sold to potentially the Goodwill because we unfortunately decided that storage is not a good idea. We got separated into different groups, and this time my group is figuring out the space for the event.

Week 10

This week, we worked on finishing up our case study, and food container for the Campus Cupboard, which I will post photos of soon. We also finished the powerpoint presentation and got the Project Plan laminated. Everything looks great, and we are all looking forward to presenting our results, even though we didn't get the chance to donate any food.

Theory U Chapter 15-18 Reflection

Chapter 15: Grammar of the Social Field

Chapter 15 basically discussed the epistemological and ontological aspects of reality and our misunderstanding of the process of social reality creation. The 21 propositions of social field theory were also introduced. The first proposition, however resonates with the rest of the propositions, which is that social systems are enacted by their members in context. Basically, you enact the system in which you operate, whether its good or bad. I found desencing and absencing to create a better understanding of not being able to learn from the future. Desencing is intolerance and lack of empathy for other views, and absencing is the worldview in which the source of the problems is exterior, not interior.


Chapter 16: Individual Actions

What I found to be the most touching out of this chapter is the story of Hitler's secretary, who seemed to involuntarily get sucked into a dangerous situation. She seemed to lose connection with her authentic self, and participated in the practice of anti-emergence. She was also being self-diluding, which means that she lost her connection between her own image of the unfolding future and reality. The raging war and the ruling fist of Hitler made her look like she was a part of the violence being his secretary, when in reality she simply wanted a job.


Chapter 17: Conversational Actions

Chapter 17 discussed the generic field patterns in conversations, which are downloading, debate, dialogue, and presencing. These four fields differ in terms of the inner place in which conversation is formed, which can be because of what they want to hear, what they really think, seeing yourself as part of a larger whole, and speaking from what's moving through. These four categories, I feel are the main parts of conversations in terms of what you're thinking while talking to somebody. A lot of people, including myself, tend to not speak what they truly think in order to avoid confrontation and debate.


Chapter 18: Organizational Actions:

This chapter talks about how different businesses can be structured and organized. The two different bureaucracies discussed were machine and professional. A machine bureaucracy is organized around standardization of process, while a professional bureaucracy is organized around standardization of skills. From taking these meanings out of context, I feel that factories and more laborous jobs tend to follow the machine bureaucracy, while jobs that require more skills acquired from a four-year college education, such as computer science, education, and graphic and interactive design lean more toward a professional bureaucracy. I also found the differences between the shifts from centralized to decentralized, and decentralized to network structure interesting. The shift from centralized to decentralized basically moves from the center toward the customer, and from decentralized to network depends on the relationship of the coworkers and their coordination happens through mutual adjustments in networked relationships.

Week 9

This week I worked on the step-by-step project plan, which initially was created for just Millersville students to take on in the future if we didn't have the resources to do it. After discussing with my teammates, we decided to make it into a plan for other schools to do as well. I also made it a bit interactive, so that the people using it can write on the lines given, and can see our examples below each step.

Campus-oriented:

Oriented for Any School.

We also met up with Gerry Shehan, and discussed further about potential donations we could make, and he then referred us to the director of the Campus Grill on campus, who might have food that we could donate to the Campus Cupboard. I was not expecting it to be so difficult to donate wasted food after seeing all of the food being thrown out at my workplace, which couldn't be donated because of contamination reasons. My manager suggested the leftover cereal cups that the Anchor tries to get rid of, which has a longer shelf life and a bigger chance of being donated, versus the salads and sandwiches which only last for about a day.