One For Animals: Brainstorming Time
In our last workshop, we were assigned to make teams and discuss our project ideas more in depth. As a team, we have chosen the animal rights to be our main idea and we wanted to collect more and more information about them. So, we took a huge blank paper and we started to write every single thing we had in mind about animal rights and animals in general.
As we had already chosen a specific topic, we jumped right into the brainstorming. This means that we had to share every little thing we think it goes well with our project for 15 to 30 minutes no matter how good or bad idea it is. Everyone in our team could say whatever felt right or interesting, so that we had more and more inputs in our mind. So, we wrote our group name in center (“One For Animals”) and phrases that matched on the side. First of all, we highlighted the two Sustainable Development Goals we chose, which is Education and Life on Land, as we think they are more suitable to our main topic. Then, we wrote ideas that we can refer to, like animal abuse, bad conditions in farms, leather products, meat consumption, animal testing, zoology as a school course, abandoned pets etc.
After the vital part of brainstorming, we had to pick our favorites and analyze them. As a team, we really liked the idea of introduction of a new school subject. This would be zoology. We want to emphasize the importance of education, as everything starts in school. Children learn to talk, to write, to cooperate and they build their personality within school, so why not teach them to respect animals too? This would be beneficial for every single of us,but for the environment too.
Although we are really excited about making a difference in our world, we completely understand that there will be many obstacles. It is certain that many industries will react, such as stock-farming industries, companies exploiting animals for entertainment and profit (zoo, circus), but also fashion and cosmetics industries. Moreover, people in general will disagree, because they aren’t used to this way of lifestyle, but we will overcome these barriers with patience and persistence.
After we managed to organize our thoughts based on OpenIDEO’s brainstorm toolkit, we feel more confident and more informed about our project. So, we will take one step at a time, because this makes everything easier and more simple, and we will continue with the other plans. Firstly, we aim to make a video campaign to show and inform the people about the animal abuse and then, we have as main goal to build our own online platform with great visual content on our topic.
