To start, we all shared our research/thoughts/how the project had progressed over the past couple of weeks.
My thoughts were all about, how do we strip this back to something simple, clear, and communicative? How do we re-instigate type as the central tool?
I had come across World Tsunami Awareness Day when doing some research which is a very New Zealand styled "campaign" but was actually generated by the United Nations General Assembly as part of a world wide recognition around the natural disaster. [Taken from their website]. "It is important to create a community and individual understanding about how and where to evacuate before a wave strikes. Tsunamis know no borders, making international cooperation key for deeper political and public understanding of risk reduction measures. As a result, the UN General Assembly has made 5 November into World Tsunami Awareness Day, with the first edition being held this year [2016]." The team all agreed this was highly relevant research and it did have a very kiwi feel through the use of pattern similar to the Maori patterns that were looked into in previous weeks.
Kim had done some really great visual research and I was particularly intrigues by the idea of using ripples as a feature, and looking into height that spreads down onto the ground.
From this we spent about an hour just bouncing around and playing with ideas.
A key turning point in our process was when we thought we were all on board with this idea of ripples, but we were actually on completely different pages!
Whilst many of us were thinking of using the ripple as a situation/placemaking tool, i.e. follow the outer rings to the middle of the ripple as that's where you'll be safe, others thought of it like rippling water in terms of wanting to be away from the rough area (the middle) and move out to the edges of the ripple as this will be where the least damage will occur. It was well put by Katie when she mentioned "in an Earthquake you wouldn't want to be in the epicentre would you?"
This kind of but a bit of a speed bump in front of us as we discussed whether these opposing interpretations could be combatted but couldn't come to a resolution so what we've decided is to keep in the back as an idea that we will get feedback on from the class.
We also thought about subtle places/areas we could use to create placemaking/navigational type and considered the kerb of the footpath as this is a currently unused space. However ran into a lot of issues there as well with people thinking of it as a dingy space, where the rain water goes, and things get clogged up etc.
We sat for a while just thinking and talking aloud about what we were trying to solve and even went back to the brief again. The key points we took from the brief were:
Tsunami guidelines can be easily noted and forgotten, enabling a certain level of societal complacency.
Can indicators that show the way to safety be integrated into the city unobtrusively or in some obvious way to amuse (and thus become memorable) for locals and visitors alike?
How might the diversity available in visual, spatial and interactive media provide a permanent yet discreet and aesthetically interesting reminder of the situation Wellingtonians may need to confront at any time?
And our own thoughts were how do we create something that is big enough and has enough impact to be noticed and memorable, but isn't so big that its intrusive? TOUGH ASK!
Then we started watching some videos of a tsunami, and thinking about what happens in a tsunami and whilst devastating to watch actually really helped. We thought up together about the displacement of objects in a tsunami - boats end up on roof's etc. And then we thought about how we could replace the boats with type and have it dimensionally sticking out of or on buildings at obscure angles as if it had been washed into them. We built on this and thought about using the letters of TSUNAMI in a way that from one letter you can see another letter or two but can't see all of them at one point. We all fell really in love with this idea and wanted to get into testing it but didn't have the capacity today.
We then remembered that even though there were only 6 of us - we were a "supergroup" which meant we still had to develop another solution.
We thought back to last weeks feedback and how the tutors had been somewhat disappointed that the team had moved away from the lamp posts, and went back to this and thought about how that could develop as an idea. We came up with a really neat idea that developed off the original one where some lamp posts in the cbd are painted blue and have blue light installed instead of orange. And on these - at approx eye level height - would be instructions on how far it was to a tsunami safe zone. This is a simple navigational way to generate tsunami awareness and also provide an aspect of wayfinding. We liked adding information at this level of the post as we had been struggling with where to put information for people as on the ground didn't seems like the best option as in the situation of a tsunami there are potentially going to be too many people moving around for you to see whats on the ground. I mocked this up roughly so that we could get feedback on it at tomorrow's presentation.
We then put together a slideshow to show our ideas visually so as to hopefully be able to get some good feedback on them, and get some people inspired to join us to work on them as two members have to leave the group this week as it is their 3rd week on the project.
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