Monday, February 14, 2011

Participatory workshop

Today we had participatory workshop day. First in action was group 4, Taipei River urbanism. When we got in to the class, they gave us a piece of paper which contained our group number and our role in this groupwork. My role was a local fisherman and in first assigment I had to think where he would like to live in Taipei if he can choose. In second assigment we were given a number of chips, which we had to put on some important sectors to represent what would be important for each person that we represented. Different roles that we represented had different amount of chips like in real life some have less some have more. In third assigment we had the opportunity to rethink Taipei city.The task was to rebuild Taipei the way we wanted.
I think  this group gave us clear view that there are many different stakeholders in urban areas and they all  have different views. Groupworks were very good organized and a fun way to learn.

Group 1  - sustainable campus -waste management was next to represent their work. First they gave us a lot of information on their subject. First assigment was a quiz about waste management. Their second assigment for us was a group work where we had to think about waste management. We had in our tables different kind of waste and we had to put them in right places in waste management like biomass, hazardous waste, mixed waste and energy waste. This work gave me a lot of information about waste management and it insipired people in the groupwork to discuss. Group gave us info sheet about waste management which I found useful.

Then it was time for our workshop. First we put people to think about their knowlegde about nanomaterials. In  second task we show people different kind of materials and asked them if they think these would include nanomaterials or can be produced to nanomaterial. Third part in our workshop was a video about nanomaterials and power point slides on subject. In our last groupwork we got people to think about what would be the best way to get information about our subject. By this way we gathered information on methods that we can use to reach peoples thoughts. Each member in our group had done their part of the work very well and I think we did great work :) I think we also got good feedback and everyone had fun.
Tomorrow we will meet again with our group members and discuss about outcome of our workshop.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Changing the focus


The latest group meeting was quite effective. Ulla’s clinic will be on next week and we need to prepare the project proposal and to make plans for the workshop. The last class discussion with our course mates made it clear that people are more concerned about how nanomaterials are affecting them. So we decided to change our focus from nanomaterials in aquatic systems to the effects of nanomaterials on living environment and the possible health impacts. In this way we have a better opportunity to reach our target group, consumers, who are more interested in things that maybe cause some health effects. Decision makers and the industry using nanomaterials are still in our target in a way. If we can increase the knowledge of consumers of nanomaterials, we can indirectly achieve changes in opinions and actions in these two groups too, industry and legislators. Now it seems that development of the nanomaterials are going faster that studies related to environment and health.

How to bring this information to consumers? We made a list of communication tools, where different medias where strongly present. It was fun to play with ideas making a video clip for a TV or a newspaper article for the biggest newspaper in Finland. We also recognised that our technical skills are not very broad and we might need some help from outside. However what the end of this project is going to be it’s still a big learning process for all of us like one member of our group reminded.

The frames of our workshop are also ready but we still need to discuss about the details. Personally I felt quite hard to combine our lecture subject “participatory methods” and our project subject. How we can take advantage of the workshop and make good use of the results we get? But it’s the best part of the team working, when your own mind is empty there is always someone who supports you and gives some great ideas you can start to develop further.   

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

our first meeting with the group

In  the last mondays lecture we got to know each other. We also got familiar with our topic which is  nanomaterial and plastic debris in aquatic systems. Our object is to identify the problems and find the ways to raise awareness in our target groups.

Last week one day after the lecture we meet with my group for the first time. Our group decided to focus on nanomaterial debris in aquatic systems.We tried to find target group for our work but we did not yet decide it.Our options are consumers, industry, decision makers and media. For the next meeting we all have different tasks to complete before the next meeting. We all focus on one subject; sources, environmental problems, health threats and process. Trough this we try to identify the problems.

Our group will meet tomorrow and we will discuss about the content of the project proposal and the concept note for the participatory workshop.