Week 4 - Brainstorming

During class on Thursday, Rachel and Chenming saw my private message on Second Life, and we exchanged each other's phone numbers. Shortly afterward, I made a Whatsapp group so that we can easily contact each other especially since I knew in the future it would be useful to be able to plan meetups and contribute ideas that we might have after the fact. I also wanted to make sure that we didn't have to entirely rely on Second Life as a sole source of communication because none of us play the game often so it would be difficult to rely on everyone being online at the same time.


We decided to meet up in Second Life at 5pm the next day within the TU Dublin Campus. I was pleasantly surprised because I normally have some trouble when it comes to meeting up with groups for other modules as there are issues with clashing timetables. I think one of the good things about meeting up through the game or online in general is that it's much easier to set up as you don't have to travel somewhere to meet up or wait for others to finish the class. Meeting up online is much easier to fit into a schedule, although I'd imagine it would be harder if we lived in different countries due to the difference in the timezone.


We began by having some small talk and getting to know each other better, similar to what SiteArm was suggesting last week during his presentation. We then started brainstorming for the project. As Rachel and Chenming were suggesting ideas, I recorded them into a hardback to make sure that we'll have them for the next time we meet up. We found it quite challenging to come up with ideas at first because the topic of the project was very broad, but overall I think we managed to come up with a good variety of ideas. I suggested ideas that I felt were very relevant such as the waste that is produced in college especially as an art student or the amount of unnecessary packaging on products. These are topics that I feel especially passionate about, but overall I'd be willing to a presentation on any of these topics as long as everyone else is passionate about it as well.


The ideas that we discussed can be summarized in the following points -

• The impact of fast fashion on the environment and the waste it produces. 
• How renewable energy can be incorporated more into our society.
• The way that farming damages the environment especially with the introduction of genetically modified crops or the methane produced from cows. We also discussed ideas such as replacing red meat with white meat as well as afforestation.
• We thought about how transport can be more efficient while reducing harmful emissions. For example, using other forms of energy such as a magnetic force instead of petrol or electricity.
• We discussed the way that other countries such as China or Japan make the most of their limited resources and how other countries can incorporate these into their society. 
• The need for more recyclable art, fashion, and goods in the future. 

The notes that I took down during the brainstorming session.

Overall, the brainstorming session went really well as each of us contributed a variety of ideas in the thirty minutes that we talked to each other. I feel that SiteArm's talk really helped me personally as I recognize the importance of getting to know each other in the making a successful team, I think that it helped me be more open about my ideas. Personally speaking, I'd like to cover a topic that is relevant to almost everyone in the world such as fast fashion or ways of improving efficiency because these are universal topics and we could create an engaging presentation out of these topics. It's essential to target an area that's a huge contributor to climate change especially to senior leaders who may have the power to change these areas. A few days after our meetup I thought of the idea of reducing, reuse and recycle. I feel that there needs to be more of an emphasis placed on it, especially regarding reducing and reusing as I think that those are especially important for reducing harmful gases and climate change as a whole. I noticed that society tends to understand the value of recycling, but rarely do people reduce habits such as reducing the number of harmful products they consume for example. I'm interested to explore these ideas and others in the future.