Precis

Drawing Class Work

These are two of my assignments from this semester so far in drawing class. The one on the right is in pencil and the one below is in watercolor. I posted these because this was my first attempt at watercolor, and I want to remind myself that I need to keep practicing.

More Guerilla Marketing Examples That are funny

Guerilla marketing 101

In this form of Marketing we chose to use home furnishings found at the Salvation army to "decorate" the Park and Ride bus shelters around the UNCG campus. This would not only highlight the project of BUS/SHELTER but also a later project working with a Salvation Army store which will be later in the year.







Another form of marketing that we decided on involved the speaker on the bus system itself. A string of words that evolve into shelter and bus which summarizes the projects that we have been working on. The plug for the blog at the end will direct riders to look at the other work that we have been doing.


To look at other forms of marketing taken on by our group look at these blogs:
Kurt
Kevin
Lily

Codes+

Following our experiments with codes, ergonomics and proxemics a few issues of our designs have been revealed but we have also learned something new about the way people are thanks to the research we preformed. For example we discovered that people are generally comfortable having a space of about four feet between them and people they do not know which interestingly enough has effected our original estimates as to how many people could use the benches provided in our bus stop. Proxemics also helped us to realize that in a counseling situation the distance between where the doctor and patient would normally sit may in fact create a little tension between them due to the discomfort felt. In codes themselves we saw a number of handicap accessible features are not built to code to better allow the mobility of handicapped people.
We think that designers should always be open to change. In fact we as designers should embrace change, it may take away some sort of element you were going for but it could also create the possibility of an even better element to your design. Codes may seem like a burden but they exist to help make sure that no one is left out and if you have a great design you would’t really want to leave some one out. We will all be effected by codes at some point or another, at some points we may not be happy about codes affecting our design but other times codes will help us form a better connection with the people we are actually designing for, everyone is different and your architecture needs to be able to react to that, other wise it will be a failure and it will lose its intent.





For the Codes+ project we had to look at Codes, Ergonomics, and Proxemics as they applied to our Shelter/Bus and Bus/Shelter project models. These are my sketches, for more, see Kevin and Heather's blogs.




This is the entrance to the Shelter/Bus created as a shelter. The codes for a wheel chair ramp were applied to the model making it 60" wide and 36" long.




This is a diagram that shows one of the doorways in the Shelter/Bus for medical care. The door was widened 12" from the existing doorway to allow for two-way flow of traffic.









This diagram shows the Bus/Shelter. The roof had to be extended in order for there to be 60"of covered space for a wheelchair bound person to wait for the bus. The column that goes through the shelter for support was moved so that someone who is wheel chair bound is included in the shelter instead of being seperated from the other waiting passengers.





The table heights in the Shelter/Bus for shelter had to be lowered in order to acomodate those that are in wheel chairs. The green shows the new height at 33".








This is a diagram showing the pathway through the Shelter/Bus for medical attention. The space is 8 feet wide, and has plenty of space to provide the required 60" turning radius need for wheel chairs- this should be kept in mind when furnishings are added to the space later on.

Shelter/Bus sketches

These are sketches from my group the "kings." We decided to design two shelters inside of buses. One bus is constructed for medical attention, and one for shelter.

Video Interview

Part 1 of the Client Charrette

As apart of our research for the bus/shelter client charrette we were sent out to get the opinion that matters the most, that if the city bus riders. Our group set out for the nearest GTA bus stop and upon sitting down, we asked the lady sitting next to us if we could interview her; she said "yes," but she wished to remain anonymous. Thinking she was about to get off at the next stop, Kara quickly sketched her. She had short gray hair, glasses, and appeared to been in her sixties. We found out that she rides the bus everyday to and from her job as a Gulford County School teacher. She said it takes about an hour of waiting and riding the bus every morning to get to work. At first she seemed a little shy, but as the ride went on, she opened up a little bit and started talking about her children. When it was time for her to get off we thanked her for her time and went on our way to the depot.


-The Kings symbol group. Illustration by Kara.

Public Transportation Assignment

Civility and Civil Rights was a very moving and interesting article. I read the article before getting on the GTA bus, which I think helped me think clearly along the way. I got on the GTA route 2 bus at the corner of Tate street and Spring Garden. My co-passenger and I rode the bus the entire length of the route, to Four Seasons Town Center and back. I was out of my element the second I stepped on the bus; I couldn’t even figure out where to put my $1.20 fare, and had to ask the driver for help. The bus was fairly empty. There was a girl sleeping at the back of the bus, Emme (the co-passenger), two older ladies, two women, an older gentleman, a young man and me. I was fumbling through my route map trying to see where we were going, and how long it would take to get back.
I started to relax after a few minutes, and began to look at my surroundings and to photograph what moved me. Everyone on the bus was accustomed to it. They all were reading books, or looking out the window, or even sleeping. They knew exactly when to pull the bell to get off, a feat which I just this week mastered on the HEAT bus. I started to notice that the neighborhoods we went through, I had never been to. They were lower class homes and government housing. The entire bus emptied off at the Four Seasons mall, where most of the bus was going to work. After that we picked up new passengers on our way back to Tate and Spring Garden. There was a school age girl with a backpack, a young mother and her very talkative son, a couple, and two older gentlemen. While riding, I thought about the text. I thought how wild it was that at a time in the past century, this would not have been possible. I rode at the very back of the bus, so that I could take in all of my surroundings, but that seat would have been occupied by an African American who wasn’t allowed to sit at the front of the bus just because of their race. On my way off the bus I saw a sign posted up front; it read, ROSA L. PARKS February 4, 1913- October 24, 2005 “In honor of her sitting.” This really touched me because her strength and determination, and local action helped change things nationally, which made me think of the article.
Civility and Civil Rights was a little disheartening. The Greensboro Women’s College in the article, now known as our beloved UNCG, hindered the progress of the desegregation movement, which really upset me. As someone who grew up not only in the south, but 25 miles to the east of Greensboro in Burlington, I know that this wound is still fairly deep. My mother went to Williams High School, the same high school I went to. During her freshman year she was bused, along with her entire class, to Sellars Gun, an all African American school, to try and desegregate. This was in 1978. I heard about the sit-ins growing up, and I knew that there was a very important sit-in in Greensboro, but that’s all I knew about it. Reading about the perseverance of four STUDENTS really made me proud. It takes the “think globally act locally” movement to heart. The local actions of four students from Greensboro helped change the entire social climate of our nation. This article inspired me to think, and to act. No one thinks that they can make a difference, but this article shows that you can.