XMP: Workshop 1

So this week we had the 1st workshop, with the idea of working on the proposed sustainability garden. Our goal was, in groups, to come up with a way to make sure students interact with the garden to help promote sustainability, especially with reference to cross media.

Most groups focused on way to make the garden technologically interactive, with varying degrees of success. The main of focus, I think almost every group alluded to or used in some way, was QR codes.

QR codes are a are an awesome technology that are well and truly overused for bullshit uses. Most people do not know what they do or know why to use them, let alone actually scanning them.

Our group fell into this trap, while also coming up with some cool ideas. We targeted two potential user groups, the junior school at UC and the rezzies. Within our group we split into smaller groups to focus on these two use cases. The juniors team came up with logo and mascot for the garden, Carol the Carrot. A first draft of carol was drawn up, looking very animated and fun:

As the rezzies focused group, we decided the garden should interact with Zierholtz. Our idea was around the idea that the garden could be used to grow the essentials for a sustainability beer, grown and brewed at UC. As an initiative to get the rezzies involved in the garden and in the beer we could hold events called working beers. The idea behind a working beer is that the rezzies take a day to work on the garden, planting, weeding water and the like, in return for cheep or free beers from Zierholtz.  We thought we could come up with a cool logo, something looking like a bee, with wings and legs, but its body as a beer bottle:

As a result of all of our brainstorming, our group, Carol the Carrot, tied for second place in the best ideas of the day vote thing at the end of the session. Our prize: a bag of lollies.

Natural Confectionary Company: Yum.