Final Project Reflection- #Return

Establish Team “Rules of Engagement”

On the first day, we were assigned our teams and we established rules of engagement. While we discussed, we all had similar ideas on how we should communicate with each other and how we could work as a team to create a final product. The rules that we established included: listening to each other's thoughts respectfully, dividing up the work so that not one person was doing everything, and defining what would need to get done before the next time we would meet. Also, we discussed the best modes for communicating and created a text group chat since that would be the easiest way we could reach each other. Lastly, we discussed what we would do if there was a problem in our group. We concluded that we would talk directly to the person and if the situation wasn’t solved we would discuss it with the professors. After we all agreed on all these rules, we started to discuss our interests and the issues we felt were most pressing with colony collapse disorder.

Idea Development

With our backgrounds: Kathryn in engineering, Grace in the DAAP program, Alaina in education, and me in environmental studies, we had different skills and prior knowledge that we could bring to the project. We all agreed that biodiversity was important and that we do not see it on a regular basis so that sparked our interest in spreading awareness and knowledge. With this, we decided to take a bottom-up approach in reaching out to citizens who own households hoping that that awareness would spread up towards larger corporations. We defined our problem as grass lawns contributing to biodiversity loss and our solution as increasing awareness which would result in people planting more wildflowers which would build diversity. Building upon this, we developed our research question: How can biodiversity be more accessible in order to increase engagement and knowledge within the community regarding the bee problem?

Our first idea was to create seed paper with a QR code printed on it that would lead you to a website with information on how increasing biodiversity would help the bees, the environment, and human wellbeing. Upon further research, we found that seed paper was already a popular topic. I became skeptical of this idea in that it wasn’t innovative enough. This skepticism increased when we had our full class discussion on our ideas and progression in our project. It didn’t seem like this was a groundbreaking idea that would help solve the issues we have learned about in class. Alex gave a helpful idea that sparked our excitement. He presented an idea of an app that would help people see their lawns as biodiverse oases. After our full class discussion, we built upon Alex’s suggestion and decided to design a Snapchat filter that would allow people to scan their spaces and see how their areas would look with wildflowers.

Our ideas continued to build upon this design. We wanted to create different filters that would show plants under one foot that would abide by HOA standards, a filter that showed an organized wildflower lawn, and another one that would show what it would look like completely untouched without planting or maintaining anything. Then with this Snapchat filter you could “swipe up” and it would lead you to a website where you could learn about the benefits of biodiversity, places where you could buy native perennial pollinator seeds, and a place where you could post pictures of your lawn transformation. This website would include a hashtag that people could click on and see a community of people that have undergone the lawn transformation. This hashtag would increase awareness and provide community support for people who fear of being the only ones participating. These ideas excited us and we got to work on contacting software engineers and developing our website.

Artifact Process and Implementation - #Return

Knowing that none of us were software engineers, we reached out to the UC software development program and emailed Chris Collins personally for help. Unfortunately no one got back to us, so Kathryn took developing the filter into her own hands. With her engineering background she had computer experience and was able to develop a low-fidelity prototype of a clover filter. She spent many hours trying to figure out the program, so she was not able to develop different filters for specific situations as we had thought of in our idea stage. Alaina developed our website and we all worked on adding information to that about the history of lawns, other nations efforts on eradicating lawns, and a section that listed native perennial pollinator plants in the region of Ohio. Grace developed photoshopped images that were also posted on the website in the intention to engage people in rewilding. The images were of known areas with grass lawns and they were photoshopped with wildflowers to show what the areas would look like if they had diverse landscapes. She also developed pamphlets with a call to action that we intend for people to pick up in the gallery. This pamphlet had our website QR code and snapchat filter so that people could learn more about biodiversity and try out the filter to engage in the experience of biodiversity. Since I am more science base and a hands-on learner, I decided to create plant boxes that would represent what a biodiverse lawn would look like versus a grass lawn. We used the laser cutter in the Makerspace to create the boxes. I collected grass from my backyard and found native pollinator plants at a local greenhouse to place in the box. Although, it is not our season for flowers so the live plants looked drab and were about to die. To replace these, I bought fake flowers that were vibrant and eye-catching. I decorated the biodiverse box to represent clover and blooming flowers. These boxes were intended to spark interest and to make the viewer step back and think, “Why doesn’t my lawn look like that flower box?”. Also, I used one of the photoshopped images and printed it out on poster paper in the Makerspace with a plexy film over-top to try and show the intentions of our filter. Overall, our artifact was the Snapchat filter that linked to our website. This filter was our solution to increasing awareness and engagement in communities to help solve the bee problem by improving biodiversity in our lawns.

Conclusion

Overall, this project was a great learning experience for me and I enjoyed working with my peers. I learned that having a lot of freedom on a project and working with different backgrounds can be beneficial but it also comes with difficulties. I felt as though we were scattered and were trying to take a new approach on a topic that has been discussed for awhile. I think we had great ideas and intentions but the implementation wasn’t as smooth as we had hoped. It would have been beneficial to have a mentor teach us how to develop the filter so that our ideas could be demonstrated better. Although that was a setback, this project allowed me to stretch my creative abilities and improved my techniques in problem solving. I am grateful to say that I have learned more about bees than I thought I would and now think of ways that I can help benefit this important species in my daily life.

Our website is shown below - explore it to learn more about the history of grass lawns, other nations' efforts, and browse the list of native perennial pollinator plants for Ohio.