Where did it all start?
This year, the year 7’s was tasked to redesign the Fremantle Port, as it was being relocated near Kwinana. To understand the space, we were working with better, we were taken on an excursion to the Fremantle Port in Term 2. On the excursion, we were able to visit places like the Maritime Museum, rainbow bridge and other places in the area. We were able to see and learn more about the history of the port and how everything would lay out and a general idea on what we would do next. From here, we started thinking about how we could reshape Fremantle.
The Giver
What is a utopia? A paradise, where everything is near to perfect. Project Utopia originated from “The Giver”, a book our cohort was studying for English. Project Utopia effectively, started from this book. In “the giver”, society wanted everything to be perfect, rules, bizarre rituals, strange things and “sameness” were the apparent “solution” to this. Progressing through the giver, it reveals that their society is a dystopian place. Even though this book is fiction, it is unfortunate that some people live in a dystopian area. This led us to our next focus point for this project – Liveability Factors: Humanities.
Capabilities Wheel
During Project Utopia, we had to use a variety of these capabilities to ensure we were successful in our projects. We had to be collaborative and have effective communication during project utopia. We had to use effective communication to distribute the workload and get feedback to improve our work. We needed to collaborate with each other to get all the work done to a suffice standard. We also had to be organised so we could get our work done in the given time frame and so we could stay on track with our work. Leadership is key in group projects as well as resilience and self-awareness. All these skills were important due to the thick of Project Utopia being in groups.
Humanities – Liveability Factors
Humanities played a large role in the build-up to Project Utopia. If we wanted to redesign the port, we would first need to understand how and what makes a place liveable. Our first major point we looked at, were objective and subjective factors. For this HASS project we had to do a liveability survey of our street and find subjective/objective factors and plot it out onto a table. An objective factor is a liveability factor that can be measured by numbers of statistics such as the weather in an area, or the amount of transport services there are. Subjective factors are based off emotions, such as the behaviour of the people that may live in the neighbourhood. We then looked at how we can improve liveability and sustainability in other countries such as Dubai. We also looked at what some of the problems are in the world, making places less liveable. These units in humanities that we have learned about, has a direct link with our Project Utopia.
Geography
Geography was a major part of our humanities report for Project Utopia (see below for more information). Geography skills were implemented in the report in the form of the BOLTSS map. BOLTSS is the most sophisticated and proper way that a map should be constructed. B stands for border, O stands for orientation L stands for legend, T stands for title, S stands for scale and source. Knowing this was important, as we needed to make a scaled map of the Fremantle port with all the BOLTSS elements.
Urbanized
Urbanized is a documentary, showing the process of urbanization from cities across the world. We saw two types of cities; those being more developed and those who were lacking this. In this documentary, we learn about how architects, people, mayors and city planners try to improve the state of their liveability, through things like sustaining energy, encouraging cycling and other meticulous strategies. For the actual assessment of this project, we had two parts. In part A, we had to explain how the documentary used the 5 documentary elements (observation, exposition, mise en scene, dramatisation and interviews), and the 3 persuasive elements (ethos, pathos and logos). For Part B, we had to explain how the ideas in the documentary align with our visions for Project Utopia. We had to pick two cities that we had to talk about, so I chose Brighton and Colombia for the fact that these two cities related most to our Project Utopia group (giving me more of an advantage in part B). Brighton’s solution was reducing energy consumption and Colombia’s solution was encouraging bikes and public transport.
Vision Board
Our first actual project for InnovatED were the vision boards. The vision boards were essentially made to show all the research we had done for our humanities report (see below for additional information). We created these vision boards to look appealing and give the audience a visual experience and perspective on our ideas for the Fremantle Port. They were a visual representation of our goals and ideas. These were shown on Grandparents Day (with a script) explaining everything in detail. Our group focused on three main things that we wanted to bring to Fremantle. Green Spaces, Aquariums and Community Batteries. We chose aquariums as part of fun & recreation. Community Batteries for sustainability and green spaces for a bit of both.
Humanities Report
As part of our Humanities assessment linked with Project Utopia, we had to create a fleshed out report. For this assessment, we were in the same groups as we were in with our vision board. This report had to include what we would bring to the vacant land of Fremantle, how the space would be liveable for all people to live, work and play. How our ideas will meet some of the global goals and an annotated BOLTSS map of the area we would be working with, and images that will support our ideas. Finally, we had to write about our ideas and any supporting research which address 3 out 8 things (bold are the ones our group focused on).
- How can we build on what is special about Fremantle?
- How can we pay respect to site’s cultural heritage?
- Who will live there and what types of housing should be provided?
- What business and jobs might locate there once Port uses
- What places can be provided for fun and recreation?
- How will people be able to travel for ‘A’ to ‘B’?
- How can the project be sustainable?
My focus for the report was on “what places can be provided for fun and recreation”. This meant I was focusing only on the greenspaces and the aquarium.
Pitch and Model
This was the end for Project Utopia and the final project. For this project, we needed to create a scaled version of our expectation of the Fremantle Port, and we would need to write and deliver a speech on this. Each group would get part of the Fremantle port cut-out and would have to add their ideas and aspects to this board. This time we got to choose our groups and what ideas we would be implementing and focusing on. To go alongside the model, we also created an augmented reality map of the model on an application named co-spaces.
Originally, we found it hard to use and interact with but eventually we got more used to it. For the model, we needed to be cautious that everything was to scale. This meant that a tree on the model couldn’t be the same size as a building. Each week, we would tirelessly work on our model, script and co-spaces and by the time the day came all the hard work had paid off.
We had to recite our script once in front of the whole class, and another three times to random parents that came on the day. All in all, project Utopia was quite an enjoyable experience, and I learned a lot of new things because of it.
Recent Comments