Post date: Sep 09, 2015 1:17:38 PM
Hey all! This is Jon here with my first blog post for our Venice team, Ve15 shops. Like everyone else, I'm very excited to be working with WPI this year in order to make a difference abroad. In our groups case, we'll be tackling Venice, the "Queen of the Adriatic". More specifically, we're addressing the problems caused to the public by the plateatici in the city, which are public seating areas around shops, stalls, and restaurants. We're hoping to solve the problems of crowding of public space and noise pollution, as well as document the current state of the stores. The team will be creating an app to help better organize leasing of public space and hopefully ease the issues at hand. It's definitely a daunting task, and it will take a good amount of hard work to achieve, but I think we're up to the challenge. For our first few weeks we have been focusing on learning the background necessary to jump into our project. We've looked at a number of past WPI projects that had a similar focus as ours, and critiqued them to give us a sense of what our final product should look like. Additionally, we've done some research regarding the current state of the plateatici and Venice in order to better understand our problem. We're not done scouring for research materials yet, but it's a start! As for now, I'm looking forward to doing more work with the team and really getting ready to immerse ourselves in the problem upon our arrival at Venice.
-Jon