Group Meeting 4th April

This was our last group meeting before we broke up for Easter. It was important to discuss roles and things to be getting on with over the break. There were a few people missing which was frustrating as the whole group hasn't been together yet. We also had to explain what has been discussed over the last week week as a few people had missed sessions, but I guess this will happen with such a big group.

 After our tutorial on Tuesday, it was clear that we are all interested in doing something "green", yet we don't want it to be an Eco-festival as that's being done already in Manchester and it is about design. 

We discussed viewing the city in a different way, encouraging people to look up and around.

I presented some research I had done about intervention and a festival called Hacking The City and we talked about hacking the way people view Manchester.

 We came up with the a kind of mantra for us all to bear in mind over the break when carrying our our individual research.

"Coming up with design solutions to highlight and draw attention to the unnoticed , retraining the way people view their city."

This was important so that we are all working from the same page. We also realised that SMALL CHANGES was the over arching concept, with making the city greener being a strand of that, not the focus.

I thought it would be good to discuss some sort of logo as a group, possibly a dandelion leaf to represent the 'weed' aspect: changing negative connotations, simple, recognisable (however we don't want it to look like we are a gardening/Eco festival)

 Or maybe the dandelion seed: spreading of ideas, change, well designed (need to make sure it's not already been used for anything to high profile)

We all agreed that an explore around town would be good to do to identify locations, highlight potential problems etc so we all agreed we would do this over the break. Hopefully a few of us could meet up as it would be good to do this together to get to know one another better

We identified the following roles with Fiona and Mark on the Tuesday, these inc:

Branding and graphics

Marketing and packaging

Promotion

Location research/mapping

Background research- green festivals

Market research- public consultation

Some of these I feel we can't get on with until we have developed our ideas, but research we can all be getting on with.

I enjoyed this meeting, it was a little awkward at first, especially between the two courses, but this should get easier over time. I am looking forward to gaining insight into the interactive arts way of working.