Champion City Part 6: I’m ordinary. And that’s okay!
Folks, let’s create a virtual safe space. Pull on your Snuggie, curl into a comfy chair, grab a cuppa tea and light a scented candle. It’s time to get authentic and real. I want to confess something to you (deep breath)….
I haven’t always understood every detail about this Mayors’ Challenge project. I’m just an ordinary gal! Not some tech superstar.
Eek! That’s a scary thing to admit as the project manager for this initiative. But it’s true. And you know what? Despite my not always understanding every detail, it’s okay. Nobody on our team fully understands every granular detail about our Mayors’ Challenge project.
How could we? A third of us are immersive technologists, another third are urban planners and the last bunch are a mixed bag of nonprofit executives, creative writers, and so on…Why would someone who has spent their entire career focused on creating virtual reality films and exhibits also understand the nitty gritty details of what it takes to create a zoning plan? Why would someone in charge of press outreach for the City also understand what the latest trends and technical specifics are of augmented reality?
I mentioned in a past post that our New Ro Mayors’ Challenge team has worked to be very cognizant of what our individual professional strengths are, and to establish a internal culture of comfort in asking questions regarding things we don’t understand without shame. We are also very aware that our project, in all of its complexity, could be very difficult for the general public to grasp.
If we - the team that has been living, eating and breathing the specifics of virtual and augmented reality, iterative design and the life cycle of city planning day in and day out since March - still occasionally get hung up on certain terminology or concepts, how can we reasonably expect ordinary citizens, who are going about their regular lives, to quickly grasp what we are doing? We can’t. That’s why we have spent hours hashing how to explain both our big idea and the prototyping process to New Rochellians. One way we explained the prototyping process to the public was by comparing the evolution an idea to the construction of a wedding cake. (That’s a real life example that someone without a degree in software engineering or the entrepreneurial life cycle can grasp.)
Our most recent efforts to make our project as clear as possible? Boiling down our big idea concept into an easy-to-read comic strip! And who better to help us do this than team member Tony Patrick. Not only is Tony a writer for DC Comics, he is a Ford Foundation/Sundance Institute world building fellow. Tony’s talent is to imagine complex and mythological future universes and then distill their essence down to stories that can be told in a limited number of comic panels. In even simpler language: Tony really knows how to make very big ideas easy to “get” using the right combo of words and illustrations. See below!
Thanks to Tony, we now have a simply written, graphic explanation of our very complex idea. Woot! This will come in handy as we try to explain our project and engage general citizens during our second sprint at the Grand Market this Saturday (June 16th).
If you’re a general member of the public who has come across these posts or any of our other public-facing Mayors’ Challenge materials, I would love to hear your thoughts. Are we explaining things in an easy way? What terms or concepts have we introduced that are still confusing?
