Update on Project Activities
Last Sunday, we had another full team check-in meeting and discussed the progression of our research. Many sub-project teams had gathered most of their data through interviews, literature reviews, and combing through public data portals. As we continued to analyze all we had collected, our thoughts turned to deliverables and the big picture. In class, we chose which sub-project elements will be displayed with maps and started to think about other formats as well, including charts and infographics. On Friday, Hannah and Jose discussed the progress of the Stanford and Salinas teams and clarified a few communication issues. Here are some more detailed descriptions of our sub-project activities this week: - Public Health: For our sub project, we have covered a wide range of items. First, I was able to establish definitions for food desert, mental health and art. For instance, food desert will be identified via mapping by understanding the incomes of certain communities through the census data. According to the USDA, the root of food deserts is due first by community poverty, meaning certain areas may not have the funding to bring in or continue local businesses. I think this is a wonderful lead to go off of. After establishing the definition, I needed to understand the geography and basically the location of Salinas a little more. Using something as simple as google maps and other online USDA maps, I was able to see the general areas of homes and their proximity to places of agriculture. For example, many of the areas of agriculture are not directly within communities but may surround urban areas. I still need to continue to identify where there are green spaces within urban areas. Interestingly enough, there have been studies/efforts to create community gardens as a way to combat food deserts. However, again I need to establish where. Addresses at this point are important for me to keep track off so that I can relay them to another partner to be mapped. Lastly, my partner has done interviews about mental health, and overall public health. He is working on contacting the arts council about digitizing the art murals around Salinas and providing the data about the artists. Hopefully we also try to understand if the are art organizations and how close they are to urban communities. Some future things could include contacting: 1. Mosquito Abatement might have the information on parks and geography. 2. Salinas Parks Master Plan from previous years. Crime: Segregation: I spent much of this week getting my ArcMap segregation model to work. I had set a goal at the previous weekend’s check-in meeting of making a functional model, and I’m happy to say that this was more or less accomplished. The model allowed me to input the deviational ellipses I had generated for each racial group and get a segregation index for each decade. I also started collecting data that I can use in a correlation analysis of segregation, including GINI indices (income inequality) and data on age, educational attainment, and language fluency. To learn more about geospatial resources on campus, I also attended GIS Day. Speakers discussed interesting topics like drone mapping and AI, but they also provided information about more accessible resources like EarthWorks, an inter-university map and geospatial data repository. Transportation: What We Observed and Learned Now that our research questions have finally solidified and the final presentation is fast approaching, we realize that we must figure out our deliverable formats sooner rather than later. In some cases, our findings can be easily displayed, like mapping food deserts or showing images of local murals. However, some sub-projects deal with incredibly complex issues that are not so easy to depict. Additionally, we have improved our communication skills by discussing and explaining the technical details of our sub-projects. In this project of projects, it is easy to get stuck in one’s own silo and forget to explain technical terms and methodologies. By checking in with each other regularly, we are forced to practice explaining our research in more accessible terms and to think about how our sub-projects fit together. As some sub-project teams continue their literature reviews, they have found interesting issues that link their sub-project to others, proving how interconnected urban issues really are. Lastly, Anpo noted that keeping a running document between partners is a great way to stay consistent with communication and updating articles. Critical Analysis The lessons we have learned from intra-group communication issues, while frustrating, will be incredibly useful if we apply them to our presentations. One of our presentation audiences is intimately familiar with the city of Salinas but may not be familiar with the details of demographic/spatial research, while the other audience is made up of academics and urbanists who may never have even visited Salinas. In both situations, we will need to clearly and concisely explain unfamiliar topics or methodologies without compromising our findings. Many of our in-class lectures have detailed similar challenges that urban planners face, like communicating with linguistically diverse residents in San Francisco or discussing the financial pros and cons of flood mitigation with local business owners. As we prepare our presentations, it is critical that we include explanations of acronyms and technical terms, geographic and historic context for the city of Salinas, and easily readable graphics. Beyond these considerations, one of the best ways we can prepare is to try to anticipate which questions the audience might ask and prepare to answer them in detail. For now, we are keeping on with our research and it is extremely fascinating to learn how much all of our sub projects rely on one another. Descriptive
In the past week our project transitioned from the gathering datastage into transforming our data into a concrete deliverable. Natasha and Caroline conducted one last interview on Wednesday in San Francisco, but other than that we have spent our time editing our audio files and photos so that they could be inserted attractively into our map. Natasha and Caroline have been selecting the most informative and important sound bytes from our interviews and uploading them to the audio sharing site SoundCloud so that they could be accessed by Jordan to plug into the ArcGIS map. We have been trying to select the most important parts of the interviews and are trying to keep the clips no more than three minutes so that the map can be meaningful to people no matter how long their attention span is. Jordan has been working on the mapping portion and has encountered numerous problems along the way. The ArcGIS online software is deceptively complicated to use as it requires a substantial knowledge of JavaScript and HTML. With only a basic knowledge in Java, Jordan had trouble adjusting the templates provided by ArcGIS to be able to incorporate our audio component. We met with Patricia on Tuesday to receive help, but she also didn’t know how to incorporate an audio component in a way that did not require coding knowledge. However, after several hours of trial and error, we found a way to embed audio into an existing template. While this method is not ideal and not exactly what we had envisioned, it is a serviceable method that will work for us. We are committed to finishing with a deliverable that will effectively tell the stories of the people we have interviewed, and we are well on our way to doing so. Interpretive Now in the midst of the more technical phase of our project, we have run into some compelling ideological quandaries. In the map-making process, we have looked into using a number of media-sharing websites such as Vimeo, SoundCloud, and Flickr, and in doing so, had to confront the paradoxical nature of this project. Many of our interviewees have expressed a great deal of resentment towards the tech population inundating the Bay Area, and the gentrification of the area is most commonly attributed to this phenomenon. In trying to spread awareness about this issue using mapping, the reality is that these tech companies offer accessible and sophisticated tools for social media sharing. This is an irony we noticed immediately when Erin and Julia asked us if we had any programming skills, and it is certainly one that is apparent to others; Melanie from KALW is focusing on this very paradox for her story about the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Is it really a paradox though? While in some ways, it could be perceived as hypocritical to bemoan tech people’s presence while benefitting from the tools they share with us, there are certainly other ways to think of it. For one, the people we have interviewed do not take issue with the tech industry itself--they take issue with the elitist and classist character of this particular industry. It is not the work that these companies do that is the issue, but the way they situate themselves within the Bay Area community. Social media is now an integral part of our society, and if it is a powerful tool for spreading awareness, it should be used. Another way to think of the paradox is within the framework of “reclaiming.” If the tech industry is one that has inflicted hardship and loss on many already disenfranchised people, then why shouldn’t those people use technology themselves, to make their stories and frustrations heard? Applicative: On Wednesday morning before class, we interviewed Michael in North Beach. He had much to say on his eviction. Needless to say, he was not going to be displaced without a fight. He fought his eviction with attorneys and the battle lasted for years. The stress and heartbreak of the entire situation also contributed to the separation from his partner of over a decade. He was fortunate enough to find another apartment in North Beach, however he now lives with neighbors and is in close quarters. He says there is nothing quite like his previous home. His thoughts on San Francisco are now changed. He says he feels as if there is a more inconsiderate undertone to people’s actions within the city. Michael was very welcoming and eager to share his story and we think he will add to the depth and personal detail in our map. Additionally, we had another phone interview scheduled with a person that was displaced from San Francisco and actually had to move to Los Angeles. Unfortunately, we were unable to get ahold of her and she did not answer any of our calls when the week of the interview had come. This has happened multiple times throughout our project and scheduling problems have contributed to our small number of interviewees. This past week we have been editing the audio from the interviews. In order to do this, we upload the audio tracks onto iTunes, convert them to podcasts, and then edit the clips in garage band. We have sectioned off each of the clips into categories unique to each individual and are going to input these sound clips that last about a minute long into the map. Each interview was about 35 minutes long, but we have selected about 8 minutes from each interview to highlight and feature on our map (along with the ability to listen to the entire interview). We feel that these short clips will be most user-friendly and their length will not be off putting as they are short enough for an audience to feel that they have the time to listen. The progress on the mapping project was slow but steady. We continued to work on the map using ArcGIS online software, and found it to be deceptively complicated to use. While it is advertised as six easy steps and has a very intuitive interface and website, it required knowledge of JavaScript in order to render the template they provide into what we wanted. I worked for a long time to modify the existing templated provided by ArcGIS online so that it would incorporate our audio component. I found an example story map provided by the Smithsonian that gave an audio tour of christmas music around the world. I tried to copy the element’s of the Smithsonian’s map into the template I had, but we could not figure out where the code differentiated and it appeared to be exactly the same. My small knowledge of coding and JavaScript was limiting, and the ArcGIS software was starting to appear more and more out of the scope of our project. Through trial and error, I was able to find a serviceable method that will help us make the map, although it is not in the ideal format that we would prefer. Everything we have done so far in this project has been a learning process, including the mapping experience. The ArcGIS software required more coding knowledge than was advertised, and perhaps we should have explored our options further before becoming settling on software that we thought was within our scope of knowledge. Our project is coming together and it is extremely rewarding to see our hard work and the openness and willingness of our interviewees on a platform that will be accessible to the public. The multimedia aspect of our map really adds an interactive touch that will attract audiences to learn more about the real issues of eviction. In the end, we hope to be steps closer in the aid of spreading awareness of no fault evictions and eventually reconstructing the Ellis Act so these don’t happen again. Descriptive
Last Saturday was a busy, productive, and exhausting day for our group. We had three interviews arranged for the day a various locations in San Francisco. We began the day at Stuart house in the Mission. He was very excited to share his stories with us, and went into great detail about his experience with being bought out of his old apartment in the Mission. He told us about his struggles with the AIDS virus and how that has impacted his experience, and provided us with a unique perspective as he was a tech worker himself that had moved to San Francisco to work for Apple in the 80’s being displaced by a new generation of tech workers. He admitted to being a part of the Mission’s first wave of gentrification, but noted how he had spent many years investing himself in the community that existed there. He was extroverted, excited about our project, and it was an overall great interview. After our interview in Stuart’s house, we made the short drive to our second interview location on 16th street in the Mission. We met with Rick in his office building which was the old Worker’s Temple. He was a photographer who rented out an office space in the building. Melanie from KALW met us there to record us for the project that she is working on. For our final interview of the day we headed to the San Francisco Public Library to meet with Yazmin. After searching for almost half an hour, we were able to secure a quiet study room in the Library to conduct the interview in. Yazmin currently lives in East Oakland and it was incredibly generous of her to be willing to make the trip to San Francisco to meet with us. Yazmin was also very supportive of our project and excited to tell her story. She elaborated on the community she had developed in the Mission since she had moved there in the early 90’s. She was a part of the queer community in the Mission which she referred to as her “chosen family.” She enjoyed being able to run into people she knew throughout the Mission, and mentioned that it felt like a true home. She enjoyed living in a place where people could work jobs that would be enough to pay the rent while being able to pursue poetry, art, and her true passions. Yazmin talked about how she now has to commute to San Francisco for her job, as many people who live in East Oakland do, and talked about how that has limited the community development in East Oakland as people spend so much of their time commuting. We have completed four interviews thus far, and have one scheduled for tomorrow. We originally had a goal of completing ten interviews for the project, but we have begun to realize that ten interviews is a great amount of work to complete in a quarter and have recalibrated our goals. We will complete our fifth interview tomorrow, and view that as a sufficient number for the scope of our project and if we are able to secure any additional interviews we will view that as a bonus. We only have a limited pool of people that provided contact information in the initial survey, and of those people few have gotten back to us. Additionally, we have had several people cancel their scheduled interviews after having second thoughts about the project. We do not view this as a failure on our part, but rather a success in that we were able to accomplish five successful, informative, and powerful interviews. We are looking forward to the next phase of the project in which we will begin mapping our data and displaying the audio and visual component in an attractive way. Interpretive The pervasiveness and immensity of the housing crisis in the Bay Area has become even more clear to us this week. Now that we have begun making regular trips into San Francisco and engaging with residents, the issues we have been learning about through class readings, newspaper articles and lectures are suddenly all around us. One striking experience that epitomizes the ubiquity of this issue occurred last Saturday, after completing our interview with Rick. We were standing outside of his apartment in the Mission in front of a small empanada shop, and overheard a customer saying to the shop owner, “I’m sorry to hear about your eviction.” Curious to know more and wondering if she would be interested in interviewing with us, we inquired further about the woman’s eviction. She told us that she was already in touch with Erin from the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, but that she had many friends who also had eviction experiences. She gave us her card and told us that she would be happy to put us in contact with them for the purposes of our project. It was such a striking moment for us to simply walk down the street and encounter an entire collection of eviction experiences. It seems that this issue is becoming so pervasive that local politicians have no choice but to acknowledge it. An article published this week in the SF Chronicle reported that State Senator Mark Leno, at the request of SF Mayor Lee, is proposing a bill that would amend the Ellis Act which requires that buyers own a building for five years before evicting tenants using the Ellis Act. Leno stated, "In recent years, speculators have been…[using] a loophole in the Ellis Act to evict longtime residents just to turn a profit...Many of these renters are seniors, disabled people and low-income families with deep roots in their communities and no other local affordable housing options available to them. Our bill gives San Francisco an opportunity to stop the bleeding and save the unique fabric of our city." (http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/2-S-F-lawmakers-push-bills-to-slow-Ellis-Act-5261383.php) While this bill is just a small step towards major reform, the fact that this issue is being recognized by lawmakers and major newspapers is heartening. It makes us hopeful that the work we are engaged in of spreading awareness does have an impact, and does have the potential to reach the people who have power to change legislation in our cities. Applicative Our interviews last weekend have brought about many thoughts and emotions. Hearing Stewart, Rick, and Yasmin’s stories about their connections to their previous homes was telling to how they saw themselves fit into their own communities within San Francisco. What was most eye-opening was the fact that Yasmin no longer felt positive feelings towards San Francisco. She felt rejected and pushed out of a place that she once felt was home. To Yasmin, living in the mission in San Francisco meant living among people she looked up to and admired. When her queer community was displaced from the city, she lost what she loved about the environment the most. No longer would she recognize people walking along the street. She now lives in Oakland, and has no intention of ever moving back to San Francisco. Because of her own displacement in SF, she has become aware of her own actions in Oakland, sensitive to the fact that she may be displacing others. Her mindset has evolved into one that pays close attention to her living situation and its impact on others. Yasmin mentioned that she overheard some people talking about opening a cheese shop in a neighborhood in East Oakland. She said that this disturbed her because she does not want to change the neighborhoods of Oakland the way that people changed her neighborhoods of San Francisco. She made the point that a cheese shop may not be culturally relevant to the population of East Oakland. People should focus on becoming acquainted with and celebrating the unique cultures that are present in East Oakland. Yasmin believes that people should immerse themselves into the heritage of a neighborhood they move to rather than look to reshape the neighborhood in a way they like. These interviews have surfaced thoughts on the eviction process in general. How does a city evolve? Is eviction just one of the many ways a city transforms and, even in extreme cases, overturns? How does culture come about in a city? What factors truly come together to create a neighborhood? Throughout our interviews, a general trend of belonging has been a significant characteristic of a neighborhood. Stewart, Rick, and Yasmin all live/lived in San Francisco for a reason. They all moved to the city for different intentions, but all in all were looking for a place that they belonged. To some, their evictions were seen as a rejection. It is interesting to think that a home is more than just a physical structure, it is what that home represents that is lost when one is evicted. In our group meeting on Wednesday during class, our group discussed that our biggest weakness and area to improve is communication. We have now made it imperative that we respond to each other’s texts and emails promptly, and provide feedback when needed. We also discussed our goals in depth and recognized where the differences were, and where there was a need for re-alignment. Our improvements have been successful! We have implemented more group meetings and predict stronger group communication going forward. Update on Project Activities
This week was a busy week for Sam and Ma’ayan. A GIS heavy week, the two spent solid hours in the GIS lab finishing up the 1990, 2000, and 2008 maps for commuters residing near Caltrain stations. Although we still need to verify the results to make sure they make sense, we tackled two main obstacles this week: accounting for water within buffer radii, and normalizing their mode shares. The first obstacle, water, had been skewing the total amount of land within each buffer area, causing incorrect calculations for the mode shares. By subtracting the amount of water area from each buffer, the team was able to solve this issue. The second and more difficult obstacle was normalizing the mode shares. After an agonizing hour with Patricia of going over the data and trying to find what was throwing off the mode share percentages, we realized some block groups had zero Commuting Workers, which previously we had changed to one since we divided some values by this Commuting_Workers variable. Now, this change was taking its revenge as it mistakenly increased the weight of each block. In order to counter this, we normalized all of the various mode share percents, and thus made their sum equal to one. With these two issues tackled, the team sat down with Adina and found some anomalies in the data that now we must fix. As we finish our maps this weekend, we will pour over excel tables to see where we have some issues that need to be addressed. In addition, this week we also started collecting the data for workers employed around the Caltrain station. Using the Census Transportation Planning Tool, we have navigated through the website and collected the tables we need. This tool is incredibly powerful and has a whole trove of data we are excited to get our hands dirty with. Beyond just GIS things, this Monday we also attended the Palo Alto City Council meeting which voted on a potential TMA program and certain TDM measures. The Council unanimously approved to request proposals to explore a downtown Transportation Management Association; providing Caltrain Go Passes to City Hall workers willing to give up their parking permits; soliciting bids to dramatically expand the city's shuttle program, and piloting SAP’s “TwoGo” rideshare program, and also partnering with carsharing companies to increase their presence in the downtown area. This was Sam and Ma’ayan’s first City Council hearing, and the two were impressed with the turnout, and positive responses of the public commentary. Expecting more negativity and bashing, all of the individuals who spoke up during the commentary period were excited or happy about the TDM program, and had their suggestions or questions in regards to it. Ma’ayan asked some questions about the expanded shuttle service, and choice of ride-sharing company (TwoGo), which were politely answered by the City of Palo Alto staff. Overall, the Council meeting gave Sam and Ma’ayan a better idea of how their TDM study can fit into Palo Alto’s current needs to find out more about TDM programs. Specifically, the pair hopes to now focus on speaking more with city-wide TDM programs the are similar to the size and needs of Palo Alto’s. The City Council heard presentations about TDM from Google, Stanford, and the Contra Costa Centre, and some of the public commentary surrounded the fact the Palo Alto is not like any of these organizations in neither size nor funding mechanism. With that in mind, Ma’ayan and Sam are sending out their follow-up requests for interviews to TDM programs that are similar to Palo Alto’s circumstances. What We Observed and Learned This week was a very good week in terms of learning for Sam and Ma’ayan. Starting off with the Transform Summit, the team divided and conquered for various panels that would be relevant to the group. Ma’ayan attended the morning panel on TDM programs, which Adina was moderating. Matt Bronson from the City of San Mateo spoke about specific TDM measures that were developed in 2005, which requires all new developments in the city to enact some traffic mitigation and TDM measures in order to get approval to build. In addition, San Mateo is currently also rolling out a series of TDM measures for their downtown area, which were developed in 2009. After him, Jessica Sullivan of the City of Palo Alto gave a short presentation on the TDM Palo Alto is considering, which Sam and Ma’ayan both later heard the full version at the City Council meeting on Monday. Ann Cheng, from Transform, discussed the GreenTrip Planner program which helps cities, citizens, and develops see how much or how little parking their require in their building based on a number of different factors. In addition, GreenTrip encourages a series of various TDM measures to discourage driving and increase the mode share of alternate forms of transportation. Finally, Steve Rainey of Cities 21 spoke on some common TDM measures and potential future technologies. The session was particularly helpful to get a better understanding of some programs that are already in place, or in development around the Bay Area that tackle traffic demand. Sam attended a morning session titled “The Future of Silicon Valley Is Riding on Transit.” The presentation featured a panel of the heads of major transit providers, including the General Managers of BART and the VTA. Each panelist spoke briefly on the successes and challenges facing their respective agencies before opening to questions and discussion from the audience. These transit agencies--including Caltrain--are struggling with the ability to accommodate increased demand while providing access to the greatest percentage of the population. The class sessions this week were incredibly linked to Sam and Ma’ayan’s project-- Sustainable Transportation. First, Chris Lepe talked about future and planned projects around the Bay Area, which led to a short discussion between Sam and Ma’ayan about some of the challenges and opportunities for the City of San Jose in regards to their traffic demand management. Deland’s reflection session on Wednesday addressed some of the more philosophical questions regarding the role of TDMs and sustainable transportation, and the kinds of services they provide. This discussion between serving transit dependent people and serving the greatest amount of people is incredibly relevant for TDMs-- which are usually aimed at incentivizing alternate forms of transportation for people who otherwise would be driving. Rarely to TDMs aim to make commutes for transit-dependant people cheaper, although often inadvertently they achieve just that. After Deland’s wrap up session, Brodie Hamilton discussed Stanford’s TDM programs, which was insightful for Ma’ayan and Sam to see a “best case scenario”, of a major employer with lots of financing, freedom, and room to experiment/ try new things in regards to their programs. Stanford’s CAPRI program, for example, was particularly interesting as it is quite effective, fun, and innovative. Although hard to implement for larger areas with potential security pushback from residents and more exits/ entrances, the program is nonetheless impressive. Moving Forward Moving forward, this weekend Ma’ayan and Sam have divvied up their work to make a final big push on their project. We plan to gather 2013 data, and also map that for people who live around the Caltrain stations. We also plan to finish the map for individuals who work around the Caltrain station. The team will transcribe their two TDM interviews, and send more follow-up emails/ confirm interview times. Although these are big goals, since we now have a good methodology with all of the kinks sorted out for creating the different maps, we believe we can accomplish all of these last goals this weekend so to work on our website next week and start summarizing our findings! Descriptive (Eric)
This week proved extremely useful for our group in planning and organization for our project. In the coming week we will be quite busy working on organizing data from our surveys and workshop at Lawton Middle School, which proved to be extremely valuable. Using the discussion from class on Wednesday we were able to structure group dynamics even more so. Laetitia created a Calendar and time sheet for the group in which we laid out each of our schedules for the upcoming week and coordinated times in which we can all meet in person and discuss the project as a whole. Throughout the project we have been using group-text to stay in communication when meeting in person is not an option. This has been a great tool for all of us in staying on track for the project and coordination when meeting up in San Francisco. This week we will primarily focus on putting data from surveys in written form and responding to/inviting our contacts to the final presentation. A rough outline of a street map will also be in the works for this week as well as continued modification to our design ideas from recommendations and information provided to us by Nicole from Walk SF. Nicole actually provided a pamphlet for us that contains statistical numbers of pedestrian-car accidents, city goals, and increased pedestrian travel numbers, all of which will be incorporated into our final presentation. As a group we discussed the importance of each section of our presentation and determined that we should spend a major chunk discussing street design and the ideas we have on improvement. We will also spend a portion of the presentation discussing what was learned while completing this project, both about sustainability and working with community members and planners to complete such an important project. Janice continues to provide us with valuable contacts and information which we are very grateful for. Recently linking us to a Erica Simmons’ (an Intern from the Bicycle Coalition) blog of West Golden Gate Park and her findings/research on bicycle and pedestrian safety in that area. In addition to this, Janice also condensed and modified our Survey which she plans on putting in the weekly newsletter for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, along with an invite to the final presentation. We continue to take major steps in completing our project and are very excited to see all of our work finalized. So much has been learned throughout this quarter already and we are anticipating amazing final presentations from all four groups. Interpretive (Amy) This week was very much a planning and working week. We covered a lot of administrative business which, although tedious in the moment, is fundamental to thorough project deliverables. As described above, our work this week consisted primarily of sifting through all our outreach responses and codifying this data. We are organizing the data by similarity of responses, usefulness of the information, and general relevancy of the responses. We are finding this to be a challenging step because we have gathered so much information at this point. Our outreach has been extensive--interceptor interviews in Golden Gate Park, in-person interviews at the SF Bike Coalition headquarters, a design workshop at Lawton Middle School, an online survey to about five neighborhood groups in the Sunset District, and another online survey to the SF Bike Coalition. We are being very vigilant and discerning about which information is actually helpful and/or which we would like to use in our final presentation. With the time and interest constraints of our short presentation, we have to continually engage the audience while still reporting back our most significant findings. Finding this balance will take trial and error in the preparation stage, and by clearly compartmentalizing our data we hope to make the compilation of our presentation easier. Furthermore, we need to undergo this stage anyway to organize the wealth of data we have gathered. In general, the response rate to our online surveys has been disappointing. We have only received 9 responses to the survey we sent out via SurveyMonkey to the five organizations in the Sunset District. This speaks to the power of in-person interviews, especially in the information age when people’s inboxes are overwhelmed with various asks. Ideally, we would have hosted another workshop or neighborhood forum if we were not restricted by the timing of a 10-week quarter. That being said, we are very pleased with the results of our in-person interviews and the workshop at Lawton Middle School. Those opportunities to engage face-to-face were invaluable to receiving candid input to our project from the locals who know the area the best. As outlined below, we have devised a timeline for the remaining two weeks of our project, including an initial outline sketch for our final presentation. After completing these planning measures, we feel a bit more secure in the direction of this final project push. Laying out the work that must be completed and assigning each group members necessary tasks to complete is the first step to systematically tackling our to-do list. Although we believe we have been relatively well organized throughout the quarter, coming up with a weekly to-do list may have been a more effective strategy from the start. Speaking of strategizing, we really appreciated the teamwork reflection activity we completed in class this week. It was a good opportunity to reflect on our group cohesion and make some slight changes which will help us in these final weeks. General areas of improvement for the group include being realistic about our project scope, planning ahead so we can alleviate scheduling conflicts, and being more vocal about our group work and concerns. We agreed that we could be more responsive to our community partners, which may be facilitated by assigning a group spokesperson. In order to assist with these improvements, we made a When2Meet online calendar for the next two weeks with all our available times listed, and decided that even quick in-person meetings are more effective than email chains and Google Docs. It is never too late to make improvements, so we implemented these right away. We are grateful for the opportunity to come together as a group and positively reflect on our experiences. Applicative (Laetitia) We will be spending the first half of the next week gathering, coding, and analyzing the results from all of our surveys and interviews completed throughout the second half of the quarter. This will include a short survey sent to the parents of the 8th grade Lawton Middle School students, as well as a short interactive online exercise for Mr. Streepy’s second class, which we did not have the opportunity to lead our design workshop with. The survey and interview results we expect to gather are from the following groups/categories:
We will also follow up with correspondents from throughout the quarter, such as Alex Cain in the Sunset District and Ben Grant of SPUR, giving updates and asking for any last bits of feedback they may want to share with us. We will additionally extend an invitation to our final presentation to all of our community contacts from throughout the quarter. Much of the next week will be spent devising initial design implementations for the Lincoln Way intersections and the Panhandle cyclist crossing into Golden Gate Park, informed by the survey and interview results from the past several weeks. By Monday class, we will have individually grouped our primary intersections of focus according to their similarities in constraints and design shortcomings. We will gather to compare conclusions and reach a group consensus on three (or four maximum) groups. Eric will spend the weekend organizing the Lawton Middle School students’ design ideas that they mapped out on the handouts and discussed during the workshop. The entire group will peruse the design resources provided by Nicole of Walk SF. The three of us have filled a When2Meet and scheduled times outside of class when we’ll meet in person to complete tasks that we won’t be able to do individually. This was a particularly timely effort for the Wednesday reflection activity, as we had agreed that a big obstacle to overcome would be figuring out times that we would set apart exclusively for the project:
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