What is Project Utopia?

Project Utopia is a large project the whole of the Year 7 cohort was a part of. We were put in groups of four to five (My group was me, Adam Glass, Eva Small and Sienna Scahill), with the goal to make the Fremantle Port a community where all people thrive, and to display our work at a showcase in Week 9. Each group decided on a certain focus for their idea, with all the groups displaying their ideas in at the end of term. Previous year groups had the goal to create a utopia from scratch, whereas this year we are redesigning Fremantle Port. The Fremantle Port used to be, and is still for a short amount of time, a thriving port for all things between overseas shipping and ferries to Rottnest Island. As of recently, though, the decision has been made to shut down the Fremantle Port and transform it into a community. This decision, with the combination of our school choosing to help design the new port, led to Project Utopia.

Liveability:

In our project, we were also tasked to connect to certain goals and factors. Some of the factors we included were the liveability factors of infrastructure and the subjective factor of connection to important people in their life. How we connected our project to each factor was different for each one, but they all tied in eventually. For infrastructure, we had a tram rail connecting the port to Fremantle, Fremantle to the port, and connecting different parts of the port together. For connection, we decided that the trams would have a rail going over the river, helping people minimise the time taken to get to Fremantle. This idea was thought up because we thought that the current system  of going all the way around the port to drive over the bridge was very ineffective and slow.

Sustainability:

One of our secondary goals was to make our project as sustainable as possible. How we overcame this challenge was in a few different ways; and underwater tunnel to maximise travel without power, solar panels to power the trams and run excess power to the grid, and to have our trams fully electric. Our underwater tunnel was a late addition to our project, being only thought of in the last few weeks (personally it’s my favourite thing out of what we thought up). The tunnel was a great way to help people understand about the river, but on top of that, it would hopefully reduce the use of non-sustainable transport across the river. With our sustainably powered trams, some initiatives we put in (or tried to put in) to make them more energy efficient included: to make them fully solar powered and to make the tram rail in a shape that used the least energy to travel around (etc. No loops). How we did the solar panels; we decided to make more ‘modern’ tram stops, for a more enjoyable experience, and we would put solar panels on top of the roof. We also put solar panels on car park shades that would be all around the entrance to the port so that people would not use their cars inside the port area.

Global Goals:

As the goals part of the previous ‘Goals and factors’ I talked about, the Global Goals come in. The Global Goals are a set of seventeen milestone achievements that were thought up by the United Nations to be achieved by 2030. The Goals we aimed to help complete were: Infrastructure, Clean and Affordable Energy and Climate Action. Infrastructure is very similar to the liveability factor of infrastructure, so I won’t go into detail here. The Clean and Affordable Energy goal was fairly easy for us to do, as a large part of our project was making our trams and tunnel sustainably powered. With our solar panels, we could provide enough power for the trams and some, so we could afford to give free or cheap power to residents or land owners. Climate Action we achieved by having nearly no carbon footprint from our project.

Collaboration:

Collaboration was also a big part of this project, with it being groupwork. We had to come up with ideas, argue most of our time away deciding who’s idea was best, and than finally incorporating that idea into our final plan, and repeat. Even though this doesn’t sound like good collaboration on the part of me and my group, this was not the only example. For instance, we managed to get work done EVEN when two or three of our group members were away due to sickness, holidays or sport. We actually did most of our script writing during this phase!

My learning:

I think, throughout this whole process, I learnt (or practised) some key things.

1. Public Speaking: Throughout the Utopia Project, we had to do multiple public speaking parts, including English test speeches, the Showcase, etc. Through these experiences, I believe I greatly increased my public speaking skills, though I still struggle with a script.
2. Collaboration: I know I talked about this before, so I’ll be brief, but I think I at least ‘mediumly’ increased my collaboration skills through communication outside of school about what to do, and communication in real life to determine who was doing what.

Vision Board:

Our task (aside from researching) was to make a vision board of our idea. For the people who have not encountered these very visual (for want of a better word) pieces of paper or card, vision boards are a large card rectangle with images of the desired outcome/plan. Our vision board was rather rushed, but we got it together in time. Our vision board consisted of a small description of our project, with sections for trams, the tunnel, and power, respectively. A small portion of our vision board actually got duplicated accidentally so we had to fix it really quickly, as the showcase was the week after.

Showcase:

Our whole project, we were planning for the showcase. This showcase was an opportunity to receive questions, and show off our work to some important people who work in City of Fremantle, and parents and display our vision board. Some of the questions, and quick modifications we made included:

1. Disabled access to the tunnel: Originally we had just planned to have stairs, but one visitor brought up a good point that is should be accessible to disabled people as well, and because the project goal was to make Fremantle Port a community where all people thrive, we thought it would definitely be in our interests to change our tunnel entrance design.
2. Tunnel placement (on this one we didn’t actually change anything, but I thought it would be good to explain this anyway): One slightly older visitor asked if the place we chose for the tunnel would be the best spot, due to river traffic, river depth etc. We explained that as of after the development, the river would no longer have large ships travelling in and out, and that the depth would be optimal there because it would still let slightly smaller boats through, like the Rottnest Ferry, and private river-moored boats.