Exchange 1

24/7
First meeting with the group

After class we had the first meeting and got to meet everyone in the group. There is a good mix of disciplines so I got a lot of varied feedback and some interesting ideas were brought up.

There was a lot of talk about potential solutions from the rest of the team. They had a lot of ideas about spatial intervention and how installations can be used to distract people from the stress of everyday city life. The group brought up the idea that anything out of the ordinary would achieve this as the city can be a very dull environment. Even though a city is a very busy and bustling place, city dwellers can quickly grow used to the chaos and tune out everything, residing within themselves, this is not good for mental health.

The team also brought up the concept of 'leading engagement'. It was the idea of having engagement along a path where people could keep moving as they engaged with an installation. There is also opportunity to lead them along a new path in order to really mix up their commute. We talked about how rather than trying to stop people in their tracks and get them to interact and engage with something we could lead this engagement along a certain path. City dwellers are busy people and would not feel they had time to stop as they would most likely be on the way to something.

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I feel like even though the exchange was based a lot around solutions I could still work back from their ideas to see what inspired them.

I found that instead of talking about 'breaking' routines it might be better to say 'affecting' routines as breaking routines is quite forceful and many people may not have time to change up their day.