This week everyone met together to generate ideas and hear about our inspiration for the programme. We had about 16 students split between Robert Gordon and the University of Aberdeen. We started with a the students finding out about each other a bit more with a ‘find two people who came by bicycle, find two people, who …’ and such like. This worked well as an icebreaker and also served as a good warm up for them to know more about each other. Afterwards we had a welcome from Richard Ellis of Aberdeen City Council and then Jon, Zoe and I explained our roles in the course.
We used a variation of Jon’s 10x10_brief to seed some ideas in the students, although not all of them remembered to bring their photos along. The one’s who did had great ideas, and I can see this working really well in the future as a means to get the students thinking about their relationship with the city. From here we had them use sticky notes to add challenges to the city and issues around improving customer service and better use of resources. This went well, but didn’t quite go as planned – not that it ever does – but still went ok as the process always guarantees workable results.
The four starting points we ended with were:
- A means to promote and inform people about events and volunteering opportunities as well as an awareness of social enterprises in Aberdeen.
- See what can be done to inform and influence people about the pollution along the three main roads of Aberdeen: Union Street, King Street and Holburn
- Is there a way to combine the issue of too much food waste with the homeless issue in Aberdeen
- Lighting in parks can be poor, and Duthie park is great, but we also would like to see more open air cafes
It will be interesting to see how these develop over the coming weeks before the final presentation on 30 March. For now the students need to only explore the feasibility of their rough idea before we meet again next Wednesday.
CityLab! Aberdeen 