Introduction

Utopia / an imagined place or community where everything is perfect.

Project Utopia 2021 was based upon redesigning the Fremantle Port in collaboration with Ms. Lockwood, into becoming a livable and environmentally sustainable location for people to thrive in. During Project Utopia we had to keep in mind the United Nations Global Goals, Livability factors, Design Thinking Process as well as the ASC capabilities wheel to help us move through term 3 and provide a final product for the showcase to the special guests and parents.

United Nations Global Goals

United Nation Global Goals / The United Nations (UN for short) Global Goals are 17 sustainable development goals that were set up in 2015, focusing on eliminating and help fix huge world issues such as No Poverty (goal one) or Life below water (goal fourteen). The United Nations hope to complete these goals by 2030.

The UN Global Goals ended up playing a big part in Project Utopia because they allowed us to see what we wanted to focus on and push our idea to the most. Doing further research about the UN Global Goals allowed me to see how big some of the issues were, and that other groups would focus more on the heavily suited goals to the area compared to the less likely ones. My group was set most towards goal eight, decent work and economy as well as goal eleven, sustainable cities and communities. But there were others set towards other goals such as goal 15, Life on Land. The wide variety of options allowed everybody do have diverse and different ideas towards their final goal.

Design Thinking Process

The design thinking process is a tool that helped us reach our final product by going in the in the order of Empathise, to connect with our group and research. Define, to define the project and idea. Ideate, to collect ideas for the project. Prototype, to create an early model of the final product. Feedback, to get a response about the plan and design. The way that it is shown as gears shows that you can go back to any stage of the process with feedback. The design thinking process allowed us to keep on track and know what we were planning to do next.

Collaborations & Communication

Collaboration was a stronger aspect of my group whilst communication was not so much. It led to us trying our best to include ideas with some ending up being shut off before a chance was even given, while some were given a week or 2 before putting them down and out of the final product. An example would have been our sail idea that Alex came up with, we had planned to use it to stop wind, but it slowly drifted away with the ideas of maintenance and costs. But still with the issue of communication, if we did start talking, it would end up going off topic forcing us to waste time before realizing what we were doing. This was a real issue with our research because we were getting info of the web but then plotting non useful information into our research space. Unlike our communication, our collaboration was much more positive due to everybody playing their part and putting in as much ideas as they possibly could. As I did say at the start some ideas were shut off almost instantly or overtime, everybody ended up getting something that they wanted included. Like what we planned to be sold and the plants added around the harbour.

Vision Board

The vision board was what we made to be able to envision what we wanted the Fremantle Port to look like in the future. We subdivided the board into sections to show what information we researched and what was important to us, an example would be our inspiration for the port due to our idea wanting it to become a boat market, we imagined it to work some what like the markets in Bangkok and Vietnam.

Public Speaking

Public speaking is not the most exciting thing for me. Although I might be able to speak without a script, ninety percent of the time I will end up stuttering or speeding up forcing me to stop. This ended up becoming a big struggle for me as I was constantly practicing before the presentation and working on my script at the same time. But thankfully during English we were able to learn techniques to boost our confidence such as the power pose, using gestures and keeping eye contact to engage the listeners. Soon enough I realized that confidence was key to public speaking and to stand open and strong was the way to go and that if you shrink up then you will sound that scared. But one thing that caught me off guard was that we were told that we might have to go off script and improvise whenever a parent or guest asked us a question, this was not a good thing for me because I was so used from just reading off a script. Luckily our group was able to get around it and when others started falling apart others were able to finish what was being said and continue strongly. But overall I was extremely happy with my performance because of me finding it difficult to read in front of a crowd of people.

Conclusion

In the end, Project Utopia was an exciting way to see what it was like to redesign an industrial area into a community for people to live, work and play. It helped us use many different tools to let us understand the projects idea, as well as further developing abilities such as effective communication, public speaking and collaborate. It showed us a different way to present work and ideas with a vision board as well as put research and information into an organized and simple format. But most of all, it would have not been possible without the facilitators who were able to organize this project and show us what it is like to work as a team to recreate an already existing landmark into something more enjoyable and sustainable.