. 1. About The Progressive Project What does it mean to be progressive? To me being "progressive" means that you are positively integrating something and making an impact that will bring your issue or topic in a direction that is positive. It can be as small as even educating people about a certain topic or issue. Being progressive looks different in every situation, you don't necessarily have to solve a problem to be progressive.
Why did you chose your progressive topic? For my progressive project I decided to choose the topic of "ghetto neighborhoods". I chose this topic because my whole life I have lived in a relatively nice neighborhood, and I haven't really ever been around crime and poverty. I wanted to show that I can voice the degression of these lower income neighborhoods even though I don't live in one or am directly impacted by the topic. However, I am not directly impacted I have friends who live in these neighborhoods and a majority of my influencers and role models grew up in these neighborhoods. and proved that you really can change your living situations if you're dedicated. It isn't always easy to move out of these neighborhoods, and in certain cases you're simply born into these societies, but that doesn't mean that you can't make a difference and turn your life into the direction you want it to go in.
I would only have to change a couple aspects of our prototype and one of these modifications is just due to technical issues. The first modification I would make is conducting the interviews on a Friday or a weekend because it was a Tuesday morning and it just simply wasn't very busy. It also didn't help that for the first hour of being there it was raining and overcast which kept the streets pretty empty and left us with little to no one to interview. The second modification would be to make sure our questions were stated more clearly because there were multiple times where the interviewees had to double-check what they were being asked.
3. Exhibition
Progressive Day Video - (Tuong needs to send this to me)
4. Self Reflection The most challenging part as far as the work goes for the progressive challenge would have to be simply planning everything out and really deciding what we all wanted to do as a group. There were times where we had some group members who had certain ideas that they wanted to do while another group member had a different idea so there ideas collided. However we over came these struggles by just sitting down and talking as a group. I really value the fact that we pushed through the struggles as a group throughout the whole project. I feel like going into this project I thought that everything would be easy and I wouldn't have to put much effort into everything. I was completely wrong and I'm glad that we hit road bumps because it made not only myself but my group members try and find solutions to these problems. I guess my whole perspective towards group work changed because in this project we had to orchestrate driving situations and off campus work which was a whole new thing for me and I didn't realize how complicated it really is to coordinate plans out of school. I learned so much about progressivism throughout this whole project and I feel like my view on what the word progressive means shifted drastically. Before the project, I had the idea that the only way that an individual can be progressive was to physically make a change of some sort. I now understand that being progressive can be as small as just coming up with an idea and taking the steps to solve your problem. You don't necessarily have to solve the problem to be progressive, just taking the steps is what I consider now to be progressive. I now also feel that in school I can feel more accomplished with my work knowing that with every assignment I turn in, I am progressing in the right direction. For me the "right direction" is graduating which is what I and many other student have been working for their whole life. As far as how I feel our project impacted the user, I feel that we did educate multiple individuals about the situation. I don't necessarily feel like we solved the problem, but we definitely made the topic more public within our families and friends. I myself am much more educated in the whole topic and how severe it really is. Lastly, after conducting all the interviews I feel that I would only change the time and dates that we decided to film and interview people. A Tuesday morning where it is drizzling isn't exactly the best "out and about" weather. That would be the biggest thing I would want to change, along with just asking the questions more clearly.