November 6, 2009

Back again, its quite hot and muggy here. The kind of heat you cant escape from even with a fan - the humidity kills. Anywho, i finnaly ran the fourth and last design workshop for the highschool project here. We had about 35 people which was a huge turnout, much more than i was expecting to have to deal with.

I had the parents and students form groups and go over the second design proposal package and answer yes or no questions as to whether they liked certain aspects of each design. In contrast to the last time where making comments was optional, people had to be direct with what they wanted in order to give me a clear direction for the design to come. It really came down to ordering the drawings correctly and getting them to respond to specific, written prompts connected to the drawings. Telling people that they have the option to express their opinions doesnt work here, it has to almost be made obligatory, otherwise no one says anything, or they just copy everyone elses ideas. Thus, the yes or no questions such as "do you like the idea of having benches here?" and so forth.

Were hoping to package this thing up and use it as a tool to keep people in the ministry of education up to date on whats going on. At this point tho, it seems that their assistance isnt going to be super necessary next year at least considering that we heard today that a local NGO is going to build another classroom in the coming year. Yay!

Preliminary work continues on the planning for the design of the Instituto Libre; I
really need to square away the objectives of the owner before starting to fire off stuff he isnt into. I believe i heard him talking about gardens and how landscapes have to potential to help people culture themselves..

Im hoping to come back to CalPoly during my january home leave and maybe do a presentation or two in the landscape arch department. Not sure how that might fit in with what theyve got goin on over there these days, but theres no harm in asking.

Uff, this heat really is draining. The rest´ll have to wait till later.