ID 4720 Drake LaBry

health care update

2007-09-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

so i been doing a little research for my health care project and i am going for a really organic feel...i am going to be using vertical gardens throughout the structure which will be a very inviting and natural space that will spark your senses : ) patrick blanc is a european artist who has created the ideas for these vertical gardens so im basing my design off of his concept. i am creating a new age healing office along with the general dentistry and pediatric dentistry offices. the new age healing offices will include: acupuncture, chiropractor studios, yoga message studios, herb studios...etc you get the idea. i am going to be incorporating the outside with the inside using my gardens, manipulating window systems and creating an atrium as the intrance to the facility. i can see the whole project in my head and i have a good feel for the space. i have my work cut out for me so i better get going cause i still have block diagrams to do!!!!

"The problem of place in America"

2007-09-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

so after reading this article, i totally agree with the author. America's subdivisions may have created a sense of safe orderly being but it definitely does not give a feel for belonging and happiness. People try to be so private nowadays in their homes. neighbors don't really get together and hang out as friends. there isn't places to go near your home if you want to get away and socialize. everything has become suburbia. its very scary because it almost feels like everyone is becoming the same person. there is no individuality in homes and in families. there are very few cities in our country that i think have individuality. one being San Francisco. i have visited that city several times the past 2 years and there is a sense of life that makes u feel welcome wherever you go. there are tons of little pubs and museums and cafes all in walking distances near little subdivisions. you see people walking around the city at all hours, and you run into a lot of the same people at these places and form friendships. i also had the opportunity to live in Los Angeles this past summer and it too is a great place for activity and change. i know that the author had wrote about how he and his wife has a home in Los Angeles and a home in Europe and that he rarely leaves his home in Los Angeles because of fear of driving...but i can honestly say the city is broken off into little areas and within those areas you tend to find your niche. i met so many great people there this summer and would run into a lot of the same people on a daily places at cafes and bars. even in Baton Rouge i see the same people on a daily basis at the same places. i guess it depends on what kind of setting your are in though because my parents live in Texas and they fall into the category that the author is describing. there is absolutely nothing to do in there town and they never want mingle with other people around them because they people are stuck in a zone. i think that our country needs a little flavor to it. there is no reason that we should fall into the category that the author is describing.

school info for middle school

2007-09-13T19:45:00.002-07:00

The design of politics
In 2001, design and politics hit the news big time when it was revealed that Florida’s badly designed butterfly ballot could have cost Al Gore the U.S. presidency. It is perhaps the most widely quoted example of the political impact of design. Yet pose the question, “Is design political?” to the design industry and you’ll get back a big, resounding, “no.”

I suspect this is because politics is commonly thought of as the activities of political organizations—from which the majority of designers (if not majority of people) feel disassociated. But there is a missed opportunity here: at base, politics is about values, and design is nothing if not a means of embodying values.

My policy colleagues say they went into politics because they wanted to challenge the status quo and make things better for ordinary people. That’s certainly why I went into design. So maybe design is more political than you think.

If you bought a white wrist-band during the Make Poverty History campaign, you bought into the idea that design can be a political activity. The most overt use of design can be found in the symbols and touchpoints of formal politics, political organizations and national identity of course—in the logo of the Nazi party, British red telephone boxes, AIDS ribbons and white rubber wrist-bands—and these usages are about rallying people behind a political message. (After the collapse of Yugoslavia, Slovenia carefully designed its banknotes and army uniforms to signal a clear difference from the old regime and to signal its position as a western ally.[1]) This is the branding of Politics with a capital P, and political organizations rival the corporate world in their sophisticated use of it.

Groups like Adbusters use design to subvert these same messages. Agitprop, critical design, design activism—these are all ways of using the power of design to lobby and make social comment. What interests me more is not design’s power as propaganda, but the power we have as designers in shaping the society in which we live.

Design is political because it has consequences, and sometimes serious ones. The power of designers is that we can design things to have different consequences. The Butterfly Ballot, of course, was not consciously designed to have the impact it did, but it points to an inescapable question: Are designers responsible for the consequences of their designs?

Embodying ideology
Monuments to political (and corporate!) ideologies are all around us in the design of buildings, goods and services. A few years ago, a team of architects, policy makers and educationalists from the Do Tank looked at redesigning prisons. Prisons are a powerful example of the way design reinforces and makes manifest political ideology. In the 19th century, the dominant ideology in criminal justice was of power through surveillance, control, punishment of the psyche and awe of the state. Architects then designed their prisons to oppress and remove any sense of autonomy or personal identity. The most extreme of these designs is the panopticon, a circular format with a central watch tower which allows an observer to observe all prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not: the architectural equivalent of Big Brother. These designs punished indeed, but did nothing to rehabilitate their subjects. In fact, surviving examples of panopticons are known to create psychological trauma in their prisoners.

Prisons today are still built along the same model, despite the fact that ideologies have changed. The role of prisons now is to promote education and social skills to rehabilitate offenders and cut recidivism rates—an ideology impossible to realize in the old prison buildings, where, for the record, it costs the same to keep a prisoner secure as it does to educate a student at Eton, the famous private school. 80% is spent on security and only 20% on programs for the prisoners. New ideology, the Do Tank realized, needs new design, so they created a prison design that reverses that spending ratio and places the emphasis on rehabilitation. The design of the new prison breaks the building into ‘Houses’ of groups of prisoners, with cells designed to support learning through a networked keyboard and screen and to offer certain choices, for example the choice to buddy with a neighbouring cell, as an antidote to institutionalization. The ‘Houses’ are more efficient for security (meaning 80% of current spending can go on education) and more efficient for rehabilitation as prisoners learn the life skills required to run and manage their ‘House’.[2]

Fenix Knowledge Centre ©A Brunberg/B Ericsson/J Pattison/Fenix Kunskapcentrum

Same goes for the design of schools. In the UK secondary schools were built in the 1950s on a comprehensive ideology that promoted equality, but also a Fordist, one-size-fits-all approach to learning. Pupils sat in rows in front of the teacher who dictated lessons from the blackboard. 50 years later this scene has not changed, despite the huge changes taking place in the modern workplace, such as an emphasis on IT and teamwork. Now that government has a new ideology (based on creativity and diversity of learning styles) and a new curriculum, it has embarked on a massive program designing and building new schools. These new schools are just as attractive as the shopping malls where kids typically truant, and designed with flexible spaces for a mixture of group and individual work, desk-based work and role play, and opportunities for students to learn independently. The UK Design Council has worked with schools across the country to redesign their learning environments, creating new types of furniture and flexible learning spaces that support creative learning.

What better way to make the public—and teachers—see the radical changes being made to something as intangible as the philosophy of learning than to design new schools? New ideology, new design.

There has been a shift in conventional politics; a realization that top-down policies no longer work and that public services in particular must be redesigned around the user. Conventional policy makers are not readily equipped to do this. Designers are.

More power to…whom?
We think of politics as power wielded by those in the upper echelons of government, but it is instructive to note that French philosopher Michel Foucault describes power as distributed and ubiquitous—embedded in our daily lives. The spaces we inhabit, the tools we use and the systems we interact with are all mediated by design, and so design, then, operates as part of that power. It is, whether we like it or not, being used to shape society—but by whom?

Let’s look at the relationship between design and health, for example. Type 2 diabetes is one of those chronic diseases that are largely caused by poor diet and lack of exercise. Morgan Spurlock’s film Supersize Me talks about a “toxic environment” where the world around us is designed to make us less healthy. And it’s clear that design is on the side of the FMCG companies, the car manufacturers, the convenience industry.

Unhealthy food is more convenient, and “designed” to be more appealing. Driving rather than walking has become an automatic choice. If your high street is full of convenience stores selling convenience food, if neighborhoods, with poor lighting and cracked pavements are no longer designed for walking, if fresh fruit and vegetables take twice as long to buy and prepare, if food labeling is confusing and cycle lanes non-existent…then how easy is it for you to change your lifestyle, take more exercise and stick to a healthy diet?

Design is a very powerful tool. It elevates the likelihood of certain kinds of choices and shapes certain kinds of behaviours. Most designers balk at the idea that design is a form of social engineering, but Hilary Cottam, director of RED at the UK Design Council, maintains that “if you don’t look at what any design is governing, then you are being governed by it.” She continues: “The question for us is how do we find out what the effects of design are and make sure we’re using those for social justice.” So in our diabetes example, we can reasonably ask, How might things be different if the power of design was deployed to keep us healthy and fit?

As Charles Leadbeater puts it: “Design used to be done by specialists for users. From now on, in a growing number of fields, design will be done with users and by them.” In this context the designer is becoming the facilitator, the enabler, rather than the dictator of what people themselves want to do.

First things first
Political power can be broken down into three components: decision-making, agenda setting and shaping preferences. The First things First manifesto, re-released in 2000, calls for us to be conscious of our role in preference shaping:

“Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.”[3]

Whether you think this discourse is harmful depends on your values, I suppose, but that’s politics. Some designers will argue that we design according to the preferences of our target market; British academic Steven Lukes, who posited the theory of preference-shaping would say that leaders do not merely respond to the preferences of constituents—leaders also shape preferences.[4] (Industrial designers might find themselves using design to reinforce the “maleness” of power tools, for example.) As design educator Katherine McCoy says, “Design is not a neutral value-free process.” ’ She contends that corporate work of even the most innocuous content is never devoid of political bias.[5]

Crucially, good user-centred designers look at a problem from the point of view of the user, not the priorities of the system, institution or organisation. You could say that user-centred design is a political standpoint in itself. Designers observe people in context to understand the complex experiences, needs and wishes of individuals, and are able to represent and champion those needs throughout the design process.

Consequences and responsibility
Recently, we filmed a day in the life of a mum and two kids as part of a piece of work redesigning public transport. She navigated confusing signage, buses that were impossible to board with a push-chair, endless flights of steps and over-technical ticket machine interfaces. It all gave a clear message to her: you’re not wanted here. Politically speaking, design can exclude or include all manner of people in all manner of ways throughout society.

Design is political because it has consequences, and sometimes serious ones. The power of designers is that we can design things to have different consequences. The Butterfly Ballot, of course, was not consciously designed to have the impact it did, but it points to an inescapable question: Are designers responsible for the consequences of their designs?

Most debates on sustainable design revolve around this question. When asked, many designers say that their job is to do what the client wants. But as Rick Poynor points out, this is an abnegation of responsibility. “The decision to concentrate one’s efforts as a designer on corporate projects, or advertising, or any other kind of design, is a political choice.”[6] If you fulfill the brief, you choose to agree.

So yes, design is political. It’s about values, power and preferences, about ideologies and consequences. And the good news is that there’s a growing breed of designers who are political with a small p. They’re not campaigning, but problem solving; they’re not “master-designers,” but democratic in approach. They’re using their skills as designers to illustrate, create and demonstrate opportunities for social change. But the reason for their emergence is that the politics of design itself has changed.

In workshops with both end users and professionals, the opinion of the more articulate often carries more weight. Designers use visual techniques to sidestep this and provide a common and universally accessible platform for contributions. Participatory design work, if done well, can be fundamentally democratic, giving ordinary people a voice and an opportunity to influence outcomes.

The politics of design
For a long time design has been viewed as Design with a big D: the IKEA adverts’ clever stereotype of the Designer as taste-maker—the expert whose role it is to make his judgment and impose his vision on others. Now, a revolution is afoot. The success of clunker bikes, eBay and FabLabs point to a breakdown of that designer-consumer power relationship. As Charles Leadbeater puts it: “Design used to be done by specialists for users. From now on, in a growing number of fields, design will be done with users and by them.7 In this context, the designer is becoming the facilitator—the enabler—rather than the dictator of what people themselves want to do.

At the same time there has been a shift in conventional politics; a realization that top-down policies no longer work, and that public services in particular must be redesigned around the user. Conventional policy makers are not readily equipped to do this. Designers are.

RED designing with doctors, nurses, economists and policy makers

Crucially, good user-centred designers look at a problem from the point of view of the user, not the priorities of system, institution or organisation. You could say that user-centred design is a political standpoint in itself. Designers observe people in context to understand the complex experiences, needs and wishes of individuals, and are able to represent and champion those needs throughout the design process. This means the knowledge of end users themselves becomes just as valid as that of the expert. In workshops with both end users and professionals, the opinion of the more articulate often carries more weight. Designers use visual techniques to sidestep this and provide a common and universally accessible platform for contributions. Participatory design work, if done well, can be fundamentally democratic, giving ordinary people a voice and an opportunity to influence outcomes.

Designers must find new ways of working that enable them to apply their skills where they are most needed – to tackle problems such as chronic health care, climate change and an ageing population.

A growing number of policymakers are collaborating with designers to develop new public services and innovative public policy. Service designers like Live|work are working with regional development agencies to create new rural transport systems, and Engine have collaborated with think tank Demos to help schools create personalised learning. Manzini and Jegou’s Sustainable Everyday project demonstrates the power of visual scenarios in proposing alternative ways of living. Others creating tools for social change include Stefan Magdalinski with WriteToThem.com and TheyWorkForYou.com and the BBC’s Action Network team. Competitions like the RSA’s Design Directions and Metropolis’s Next Generation all show that young designers are increasingly concerned with social and political agendas. IIT’s Visible Politics work looks at redesigning the experience of voting. Yet still design schools rarely teach their students about politics, and for most this kind of work is out of reach. Designers must find new ways of working that enable them to apply their skills where they are most needed: to tackle complex problems such as chronic health care, climate change and an ageing population.

At RED, we believe an approach we call ‘transformation design’ can make it happen. Transformation design facilitates collaboration between designers, policymakers, economists, social scientists and ordinary people in order to solve complex socio-economic problems. Together with users and frontline workers, these groups design new systems and services that are both practical and desirable, placing the user at the heart of their development. Transformation design builds the capacity for ongoing innovation in the organisations and institutions it works with. RED has applied this approach to citizenship, health care and energy consumption. We are part of an increasing number of design groups working in this way, and demand is growing.

Policymakers are in desperate need of the skills designers have to create desirable, practical solutions to society’s most pressing problems.

In other words, politics needs YOU.

school info for middle school

2007-09-13T19:45:00.001-07:00

Middle School Transition: It's Harder Than You Think
Making the Transition to Middle School Successful

There are a number of transitions in adolescence, each representing a "rite of passage." Many of these transitions are spiritual or faith-based in nature, such as the bar or bat mitzvah and confirmation. One that does not get the attention it deserves is the transition from elementary to middle school. Depending on the community, this usually occurs between the fourth and seventh grade. Regardless of when it occurs, the transition to middle school tends to destabilize many students, requiring them to re-establish a sense of their identity in a more mature and demanding environment.

It is a transition that often signals increased referrals to mental health services; the failure of previously successful methods for academic success to match up with more rigorous workloads; the start of smoking, alcohol, drug, violence, and attendance problems; and damage to self-esteem—especially for girls.

It is against this backdrop that virtually every adolescent looks for answers on how to develop a new and positive identity. Because much of adolescent behavior revolves around that search, middle school educators must take time to understand and help students find those answers while guiding them toward opportunities, relationships, and skills that allow them to develop a strong sense of self. By taking a student's-eye view of the transition to middle school, educators can get a better idea of the kinds of support that can strengthen the new middle schoolers during this difficult time, and avoid or minimize a number of problems.

Trials and Tribulations
The first problem faced by most new middle school students is simply finding their way around a strange building. One of their greatest fears is getting lost, followed by difficulties in finding and opening lockers, and bringing the right materials to the right class at the right time. They must also cope with traveling longer distances to school, eating in a larger cafeteria, and changing clothes in a crowded locker room. While most of them survive these ordeals, as many as 25 percent don't. When any of these difficulties persist for more than a month or two, some form of intervention may be needed.

Just walking around in a new school can also produce challenges. These include being bullied or harassed by older students, having things stolen, having conflicts with teachers, and being disciplined. All of these can be highly traumatic events, especially for students who are having a difficult time establishing a new sense of identity.

Another problem for the new student is finding and connecting with a peer group, a task complicated by having to make new friends and emerging feelings about members of the opposite sex. Coping skills are important in meeting these social needs. For a relatively small number of students, difficulties in establishing positive peer connections may result in their having a hard time resisting pressure to smoke, drink alcohol, or take drugs.

In the middle school classroom, students must adapt to new ways of preparation and learning. Unfortunately, the social aspects of their identity are often more important to them than academic success. This may explain why it is not uncommon to see students "play dumb," trading off success in the classroom for peer approval. However, many students are simply not well prepared for the academic demands of middle school. They need explicit instruction, coaching, and support with regard to organizing time and resources for homework; responding to work that is more challenging and requires more effort; understanding and addressing the varying expectations of teachers in different subject areas; and accomplishing such basic tasks as studying, taking notes, and taking tests.

What Schools Can Do
What adolescents making the transition to middle school need is a combination of skill training and social-emotional learning. They not only need explicit proactive, preventive instruction and support in addressing the stresses of transition, they also need opportunities to grow as people. Middle schools must provide them with experiences that meet essential needs in these four areas:

Contributions. While adolescents may appear to be self-centered, what they are experiencing in their teens is more self-discovery than selfishness. Young people actually thrive on contributing to causes like saving the environment, helping senior citizens, teaching younger kids, working in soup kitchens, and helping in political campaigns.

Belonging. Adolescents seek to join peer groups where they can have a role and a purpose; find positive relationships with others who have similar interests or abilities; and feel safe, comfortable, and accepted. To keep them from forming or joining gangs, middle schools need to provide a variety of structured outlets—especially for those who don't seem able to "fit in."

Talents. Educators may not be aware of adolescents' talents that are not readily visible in the classroom. Those talents might include anything from writing and computers to dancing or simply getting along with people. By helping young adolescents discover and develop their talents, and getting to know them beyond their academic abilities, educators can build positive relationships that can lead to positive growth.

Life Skills. Middle school students need to develop life skills to deal with a wide range of possibilities in and out of school. Educators need to look for opportunities that allow students to learn more about their feelings and those of others; how to set goals and plan for the long and short term; how to work in groups as team players and as leaders; how to be thoughtful problem solvers and decision makers; and how to bounce back from reverses.

In smoothing the transition from elementary to middle school, educators need to provide adolescents with inspiration, imagination, joy, optimism, humor, love, support, firmness, safety, clear values, and—perhaps most important—respect. With our support, the transition can serve as a catalyst for positive growth, starting students on a journey that will see their teen aspirations soar into adult accomplishment.

The Need for Green Schools: Schools districts in Southern California are embarking on a major wave of facility construction, planning to build approximately 200 new schools in the next several years. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) alone has plans to construct 150 new schools. How these schools are built will have a tremendous impact on student performance, teacher and staff working environment, district operating and maintenance costs, and the region’s environmental quality for decades to come.

Green schools lessen the impact of building construction on the environment and set an example for future generations that environmental quality is essential to our long-term well being. They also have benefits in several key performance areas:

Protect Student and Teacher Health – Schools designed with attention to proper ventilation, material selection, acoustical quality and other indoor environmental factors, can expect improved student and teacher health and higher attendance;
Better Student Performance – Attention to site planning and adequate daylighting has been shown to heighten student performance by as much as 25%;
Lower Operating Costs – Operating costs for energy and water can be reduced by 20% to 40%, allowing more money to be used for teacher salaries, textbooks and computers;
Provide a Unique Educational Opportunity – When advanced technology and design in new schools are made visible, buildings can become teaching tools and important features of science, math, and environmental curriculum.

A green school for middle schoolers that they have already built:

In the middle school, students are taught essential computer skills to help further their learning process in all school subjects. Sidwell Friends supports ethical use of computers and safe and responsible online behavior. Technology is presented in a manner that fosters learning and encourages students and faculty to stretch their intellectual limits.

The Middle School lab is equipped with 18 Dell desktop machines and a SmartBoard™ accessible by all students and teachers as well as laptop carts equipped with 18 Tablet PCs on each hall. We use SmartBoards™ throughout the entire middle school for teaching and as an interactive learning tool for the students.

Sixth and seventh graders have scheduled weekly computer classes one trimester each year. In fifth and eighth grade, students do not attend computer classes; rather technology is integrated into all curricular subject areas at this level. Eventually all grades will merge to this teaching platform where technology is an integrated component of the curriculum. Classes in all subjects use the lab for Internet research and subject specific software.

New Sidwell Middle School a Living Component to D.C. Campus
Sustainable design a perfect fit for education institution’s green philosophy

Summary: Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., recently opened its new sustainable middle school and is seeking to earn LEED® Platinum certification by the U.S. Green Building Council. The three-level, U-shaped, 70,000-square-foot school renovates an existing middle school and merges it with a new wing, forming one green-designed structure. Sustainable materials are implemented throughout the exterior and interior. An open courtyard defines the building structure by integrating the campus with the local landscape. Philadelphia-based KieranTimberlake Associates worked with Sidwell to incorporate the school’s Quaker philosophy—to be stewards of the Earth—into the green design. The new school and its campus will also serve as a sustainable education tool for students.

Sidwell Friends School is a distinguished K–12 Quaker private school. Its Washington, D.C., campus, a 15-acre, 50-year-old facility, is home to its middle and upper schools. The campus sits on a ridge near the city’s highest point, between two watersheds that flow through parks to the Potomac River. Sidwell alumni include Nancy Reagan, Gore Vidal, and Chelsea Clinton.

Reconceiving the school around nature
Construction of the new middle school began in summer 2005. The building recently became occupied as final landscaping and exterior work nears completion. The original 35,000-square-foot L-shaped school was integrated with a new L-shaped building, approximately the same size, to create a U-shaped edifice. Stephen Kieran, FAIA, partner, KieranTimberlake Associates, says the project was not about adding features. Rather, it is about re-interpreting architecture to be part of the land. “We felt the first sustainable act was to rejuvenate the old building,” says Kieran. “Then build up against the old one and have the merged structure form around the landscape to establish connections with nature. The new school now performs an environmental function but is also part of the life of the campus—all the way up to the green roofs.”

Sidwell is expected to use 60 percent less energy and 70 percent less water than a traditional school. Water reprocessing, a courtyard with a biology pond, energy efficiency, a green roof, and reclaimed materials are all at the heart of the sustainable design.

Managing water resources. A courtyard wetland with a closed-loop cycle allows for water reuse. The wetland takes the form of terraced rice paddies along the site’s natural topography. Rainwater is held and filtered through a vegetated roof on the new wing and channeled down the courtyard side into a collection stream that runs under the building’s entry bridge and drains into a biology pond. The pond supports native habitat and micro-organisms that will decompose wastewater as it moves through the functional wetland. “The water collection system is completely visible to the students,” says Kieran. “They can actually watch the passage of water from the roof down into the pond.”

Energy efficiency. Actively, photovoltaic roof panels provide much of the building’s electricity. Passively, two solar chimneys on the new wing offer natural ventilation. “The solar chimneys and the shafts interconnect to the lower levels, which is made apparent by little port holes in the shafts,” describes Kieran. “Students can see air movement as it goes up, and there are bells that jingle when the air is actually moving.”

The design optimizes daylight and minimizes solar glare on each building exposure. Explains Kieran: “On the south façade, horizontal solar light shelves both screen out the sun and welcome daylight. On the east and west façades, vertical solar shading screens are angled appropriately against the east and west glare. It all becomes a compass to help students understand solar orientation at an early age.”

The green roof. A vegetable-garden rooftop on the new wing serves as an insulator and is part of the water recycling system. “The green roof is also a food garden, managed by the students and teachers,” adds Kieran.

Sustainable materials. Virtually every material in the building is either reclaimed or recycled. “The cladding of the building is 100-year-old western red cedar reclaimed from wine barrels,” Kieran notes. “Material for the walkways, inside lobby, and decks is green lumber pilings reclaimed from the Baltimore Harbor. There is extensive use of linoleum, cork, and reclaimed stone. We have displays throughout the building about the source of the materials and why they are renewable.”

Sidwell’s other sustainable features include:

Douglas fir from old high school bleachers used for window framing
Vine-covered walls and screens on the building’s west end
Bamboo doors and cabinets
Lights that adjust to sunlight
Hall reflectors that bounce sunlight into classrooms at the perfect angle to provide light but not heat
A ventilation system that can freshen air based the amount of CO2 released by people breathing in the room.

Sidwell has commissioned documentation for LEED Platinum status. “It was not a leap to go from Sidwell’s belief structure as a religion to their obligation to take care of the natural world,” says Kieran. “It now has been formalized in a LEED program, but, in a way, they really didn’t need that. The project was not a hard sell—it is who they are.”

my downtown capital city outting

2007-09-13T16:05:00.000-07:00

the bridge that takes you over the great mississippi river! great view of it from downtown

old water tower that still stands erect among the beautiful baton rouge sunsets

just a little flavor of good cajun lunch cuisine

a modern museum that was just recently built...adds a little flare to the old downtown setting

governors mansion

nice scenery to look at while strolling through the capitol area

ole' huey P still watching over his capitol he created

louisiana's most present capitol in art deco

new construction going on down the mississippi

LSU's SHAW CENTER for the arts...some more flare

our old gorgeous capitol that the city just recently refinished (facade work)

you can stop at any point of your exploration of the downtown and get a great rootbeer float or a really thick chocolate milkshake...best in town

"outside lies magic"

2007-09-11T14:23:00.001-07:00

So I read the article and I think it was pretty interesting that a professor is dedicating his life to helping people take chances and learn how to stand back and look at the little things that make life so special and interesting. As we start to think about our senior project for next year I think it is important to step back and look at the whole purpose behind our concept and focus on how people will perceive your idea…so I think that this reading was important because it makes you look at every day circumstances and find something special in them. The author says “exploring ordinary landscape sharpens all the skills of exploration”, and I totally agree with him because when we dive out of our box and explore new areas in ways we might have not explored them before we find out new info about ourselves and the spaces around us. It is important that we do not just make a project up with no ideas and further meaning behind it than just the obvious function. This article has sort of helped me to open up refuse to resist the lack of “topic structure”. “Exploration is a liberal art, because it is an art that liberates, that frees, that opens away from narrowness.” I especially feel that this is a great point because all of us in this program are considered artist so we definitely don’t have any reason to be close minded and ordinary! So from this day forward I am going to focus on my surroundings and try to record my explorations!!!! : )

PROJECT ONE

2007-09-04T22:10:00.000-07:00

ONE- Research project
- Our boy Drake chose EDUCATION! out of a hat so we are rolling with it
- We broke the project up into different education sectors
1. Elementary- Carrie
2. Grade School- Drake
3. High School- Jensen
4. College- Amanda
- Our plan is to research independently as well as interview professionals such as Hannah Heltz about trends in education design.

TWO- CXC Computer Lab- Arts and Sciences
- We went on a field trip to Ceba and Coates to view the CXC labs in their current condition. - We took notes and photos and met at our house on Tuesday 9/4 to compile our research and came up with design ideas for the computer lab in Coates

MEETING NOTES:
- Color Scheme: light and dark greys, red-orange, black, light blue
- Materials: Wood Veneer, 3-form
- Lighting: Acoustical Clouds- Texaa Strato 2, Suspended Theater Lighting, Fluorescent Accent Lighting
- Flooring: Dark Grey/Black Carpeting
- Reflected Ceiling plan, Floor plans- room layout
- Furnishings: Steelcase
- Graphics: Analog Graphics, Neuron Graphics, Matrix Graphics

Future Research:
- Whiteboard material
- Magnet Material for pin-up space
- Cost/benefit analysis of purchasing new computer tables
- Replacing office doors
- Lighting Solutions for Partition Walls
- Ergonomic Chairs
- Measure black chairs and movie screen
- Acordian Partitions- Stage area

We need to ask Matt:
- Storage solution for the stage area
- Lighting
- Whether to close the stage off permanently