For studio and seminar classes, we started from a different way of getting into the topic. For studio, we started our research by going onto the streets with interview questions. In this way we got direct interaction with the residences in the city and takes different approaches to the city. The fee back we got from the interviewees differentiated based on the streets that we interviewed. 12th, 13th, 14th are the streets that we did our research on, in the order from residential street to busy street. On the other hand, for seminar classes, we started out from reading more credential information about the city from the resources we find from the library system. We starts to get a sense of what our topic is going to be about after we narrow down the information that we obtain from the reading.
The process of searching through the library system and coming up with a topic proposal is sort of conflicting. From my experience working with our school library archive system, lots of time the online version of the resources cannot be opened. From now on, instead of going on to the online resources I will focus on the books that we have in the library. It is also difficult to come up with a research topic to do a 15 pages research paper on. This difficulty brings up many limitations in terms of only using authorized database. Since the majority of the information on the Internet is not authorized as research bases, but I believe there are still many insightful information that we can get from example such as personal stories on the internet about living in New York. I try to follow the structure that Donnella Meadows mentioned in “Thinking in System”: Elements, Interconnection and Purpose. At this point so far, my topic has not fully satisfied the suggested structure. I am currently getting more in depth into the gentrification topic by researching more information on the housing issue.
I found that the formal and informal way that the two classes are approaching to the system of the city have both advantages and disadvantage. In studio, we focused more on the small picture, people’s daily life in the city. We start from the big picture of the city’s system in seminar. However, once we combine the two methods together we get the full picture of how the system operates, which I found it is really helpful that the two classes started from different point of views. At this point I am thinking about doing the same topic for both of the classes, but one focus on bigger picture, the other one focus on people’s daily life in the city. At the end, when the audiences combine the two projects together, they can fully understand the topic that I try to depict.
