Newspaper

Our fellow classmates gave us lots of great ideas during our first critique day. We introduced the problem of paper waste on campus, and in response they told us to look into the excess flyers, printer paper, and newspapers around campus. We talked in specific about the Guardian and it was interesting to find out no one knew three locations of the newspaper stands out of over thirty scattered throughout the campus. They suggested maybe having more appealing stands, better locations, and letting the readers be aware that the newspaper was re-readable. The class also discussed other possible uses of a newspaper like for gift-wrapping, art-projects, and packaging fragile items. They also mentioned it might be easier if a newspaper had a different format, like that of a magazine.

With all these ideas our group started brainstorming about what in specific we wanted to tackle. An idea that popped up to decrease the waste from unread newspapers was to increase the number of readers or decrease the production amount. Evan Shoemaker advised us to focus on what we might be able to make an impact on more, so we started to concentrate on how to increase readership. As we got carried away with stand design and locations, Thomas and Lizzy both suggested we take a step back and make a survey first to see what UCSD students are most concerned about and tackle whatever that problem may be. By the end of the class, we created a list of goals to accomplish in the next week.

One of these objectives was to mark down the locations of all the newspaper stands on a campus map. Since only Josef knew where all the stands were, the map would be useful for the rest of the group should we officially decide to concentrate on the Guardian, as well as the general UCSD populace. Another one was for each of us to casually interview three people what they thought about paper waste on campus and touch on the Guardian in that aspect. While Josef made some small scale changes along his delivery route such as moving a stand closer to a footpath, the rest of us each sat near three different stands observing the body language of the people who passed by the stand and those who went up to the stand to pick up a newspaper. We are currently finalizing our survey to send out as well so stick around to find out the results next week!