VIP: Fall Semester 2020 Recap

During this year's VIP course we partnered with WAWA and other local community partners to help work on a community related projects to help design a solution around water treatment and help engage a community around it's water supply.

Typically our VIP classes are two semesters and the first is all about discovering the key issues to design around. So without further ado, below are some of the recaps of the presentations this year.

Group 1: Ramsey Lehman, Delauryn Brown, Sophia Mack

"a good solution should make residents aware of how their actions effect their environments"

Trends: regulation, responsibilities, awareness, community sentiments, reconstruction efforts, environmental degradation
Analysis: Poverty cycle, Corruption, Disconnect, Lack of knowledge, Hope for pride
Principles: Education, Accessibility, Emotion, Accountability
Proposal: focus on increasing awareness, identifying opportunities to make sustainable culture visible throughout the community

Group 2: Ramse Dickey, Lindsey Rodriques, Sean Li

Inspiration is the 'glue' that sticks everything together.

Themes:

• lack of fundinglocal business partnerships
• educational outreach
• younger members
• specialization methods to restoration

Insights

• A good solution should inspire communities to collaborate educate and participate
• technology
• appealing and accessible
• generational gap
• design w community not just for it

Group 3: Mary Xu, Nehemiah Wilson, Jen

Focus on the hidden beauty of the community

Trends:

• Community members care about the community, used to be vibrant and full of life and degraded over the years.
• Hosting/attending cleanups and actively trying to educate and influence others by talking to children, influencing friends, report damages to the neighborhood, and trying to change for the long term.

Insights:

• Non-residents are neglecting the community.
• Lots of illegal dumping is seen all around, wildlife like crawfish is diminishing and the community uses funding to clean-up rather than other community building activities.

Group 4: Blanca Zhang, Bianca Dankwa, Jabari Kemp, Prasnav Naik

Key insights:

• Trash pickup makes a huge difference and brings community together
• Difficult to convince others to start
• Made an ecosystem to more clearly map needs
• Simply cleaning up the trash is not the answer, there needs to be a place to put this trash

We hope you take something away from this and we'll have a full recap later on about the entire first semester. Until then feel free to check out our other content and follow us on social media.