The Giver
Throughout Project Utopia respective groups were tasked with creating a Utopian type civilisation within the Fremantle port area. The Giver is a book focusing on the idea of a Utopian society and how different perspectives can change the way a Utopian society is shaped. The Giver is about a boy called Jonas living in a world which he perceives as perfect. As the book goes along Jonas is picked for the job of the keeper of memories. Jonas is taught alone by the previous keeper of memories who throughout the course of the book introduces Jonas to a new perspective full of colour and joy that Jonas had never experienced before. This introduced us to the topic of a Utopian society and how a “Utopia” has different meanings for every person. This meant that throughout the Fremantle project we would have to design a new Fremantle fit for a diverse range of people.
Liveability Factors
Our first step towards creating a liveable society in Fremantle was learning about factors that contribute to making a place liveable. Using a wide variety of sources such as our textbook and some other online sources we learnt about the two different types of liveability factors used when determining the liveability rating of a place. The first type of liveability factor we learnt about was objective factors. Objective factors are things that can be measured in numbers surrounding liveability. An example of an objective factor would be the infrastructure in a specific area. To measure infrastructure in an area all services and facilities are counted making this an objective factor. The other factor we learnt about was subjective factors. These are factors purely based on personal preference and are about what a specific person wants. For example if you were a swimmer you would want to live close to a pool so you had easy access to this facility.
Liveability in our suburbs
To show our understanding of objective liveability factors we created a map of the area we lived in marking all the key infrastructural parts of our community. These could include things such as parks, shopping centres and even post offices. We then came together as a class and discussed what we thought would make a liveable area eventually creating some criteria surrounding this thought. We brought this criteria back home and using a scale from 0-3 marked our suburb on the factors that we created. This showed us how these factors of liveability have been used in our specific suburb giving us insight into how we might frame our own projects.
Urbanized
The next faze of our project put our skills and learning to the test through an assessment based around the documentary “Urbanized”. The “Urbanized” documentary surrounded what different cities around the world were doing to increase their liveability such as Cape Town who were increasing their liveability by improving street lighting therefore decreasing the crime rate throughout the area. We were then asked to choose two different cities from the documentary to write our assessment on, answering the questions “What is the main concept surrounding the Urbanization of your city?” and “Describe how the ideas in the documentary align with your vision for Project Utopia?”. These two questions tested us on our knowledge of liveability factors and also on our understanding of the “Urbanized” documentary.
Introduction to Project Utopia
The main focus throughout the first part of Project Utopia was introducing us to the concept of liveability and showing us how to put this into action. Now with all that knowledge we were introduced to the Project Utopia task, to design and pitch a new Fremantle Port, trying to make the area as liveable as possible for a wide variety of people. We were then briefed by members of the “Future of Fremantle” committee who showed a variety of criteria that they wanted met and then gave us a plethora of questions to consider when finally deciding on our idea.
Fremantle Excursion
To further bring us into the project we were taken to the Fremantle port area where we experienced the true size and scale of the area we were working with. We first visited the e-sheds and the maritime museum which are each heritage listed sites. We were then escorted around the shipping area of Fremantle finally stopping at the lighthouse and then returning to the main Fremantle area. Then we proceeded to make our way along the coastline admiring the Fremantle area.
Group Vision Board and Future of Fremantle Report
After we had visited the Fremantle area we were then split up into separate groups to ideate and create ideas. As a group we came up with three main ideas, the artificial reef, university and underwater restaurant. As a multimodal reference to our final pitch we created a vision board. This showcased what our idea was, what global goals it would connect to and how it was feasible in this project. After we had visualized our idea we were then asked to write a informational report summarizing our ideas.
Co-space and map design
As another method of multimodal presentation we were required to make a 3-D map of what we thought our area of Fremantle would look like. We used cardboard and hot glue to construct structures such as the university and we used modelling grass to create our green spaces. To create our artificial reef we used pom-poms and modelling grass therefore creating the nickname of our reef, candy floss reef. The other part of our multimodal presentation was the co-space. Co-space is a virtual reality platform where you can create 3-D models online. We used co-space to envision our map by creating all the items we where going to put on the map online before actually making the final copy.
Artificial Reef and University Presentations
The last step of our process of finalizing the Project Utopia presentations was presenting our pitch and multimodal aspects to our parents. We were slightly conflicted because groups were presenting so close together but overall we had an amazing experience bringing together this project.