COGS187A — Level 1

Author: Isabelle Cabana

Editor: Sharmaine Manalo

Our team was formed in the infamous COGS187A class offered here at UCSD. Our purpose is to find a solution that better serves not only our community, but as well as our society as a whole.

Team Members:

Isabelle Cabana, Connie Du, Jason Davies, Susmitha Kalidindi, Gabriel Gaddi, and Sharmaine Manalo

The six of us make up Team Ipsum and strive to work together to tackle the upcoming challenges we will face in the ensuing weeks.

Finding our Purpose

We started our discussion by expressing any interests that each of us had. We didn’t really have any luck choosing any of those topics since none of the interests seemed to line up with everybody in the group. We then moved on to popular topics that affect our society. Things such as politics, fashion, and what’s trending on the TV. These topics seemed promising and we added them to our list.

After much discussion and contemplation, we did however seem to focus more on what problems affect ourselves more personally. Problems here at UCSD that we could potentially tackle are the parking crisis (not enough parking spaces for the enormous amounts of people that UCSD encounters on a daily basis) and the On-Campus Housing website. But what we did find is that there is all too often a lack of motivation going on in students. With that we settled upon the idea of how to get, not only students, but people to try to cook more by motivating them in a game style website based upon what ingredients the user has at the time.

Defining us

In order to move forward in our goal to tackle such problems, we first needed to figure out how to define ourselves. We came up with the idea to call ourselves Ipsum which is a Latin word that is actually a part of the term “lorem ipsum” that derives from the Latin “dolorem ipsum” meaning “pain itself”. From this idea of pain itself we like to think that we are not causing ourselves pain, but rather we are struggling through the pain, in order to successfully achieve our goals. “Lorem ipsum” also plays a vital role in the design world and is most commonly used by designers to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document and/or visual presentation.

Originally published at medium.com on August 3, 2016.