Week 2: Indecisive
I’ve always been indecisive. Last week, coming up with 15 ideas for capstone was great, I could write out all of my thoughts without having to choosing one, but the thought of picking one of those ideas feels impossible. I’m so interested in all of the topics I presented and more, and there’s no way I’ve found to combine them in a satisfactory way.
Breaking down my ideas, everything falls into two main topic areas:
Jewish food/culture and climate change.
For Jewish food/culture, my goals are to educate a younger generation of Jews on the history of their family’s specific subsection of Judaism and how Jewish food has evolved because of that, and I’d like to inspire them to go to their families and ask about their own traditions and history, as it’s really different for every family. As for the way to do this, I’m not sure a cookbook is the right answer, as there are already so many of those out there. But I’m really interested in book design, and food photography, so finding a way to combine the history of of the food with the recipes and photos would be great and something that I don’t think is usually done outside of those recipe blogs where they tell the story of how they came up with their recipe and it takes forever to actually get to the food part of it all. If the cookbook idea doesn’t work out, I’m also interested in exhibit design, so coming up with a way to present the information in an exhibit would also be fun, maybe with a small recipe booklet handed out at the end? I’m not sure how that would be presented at DAAPworks, but it’s worth a shot.
Now climate change is a much broader topic area, where I’m interested in everything from food consumption to guerrilla gardening. I’m passionate about this topic because I’m passionate about making the world a better place for future generations, and if we don’t do anything to combat climate change now, nothing can be done in just a few short years. The main 3 ideas I am thinking about for this topic are: what an individual can do to combat climate change, what industries/corporations are doing that is hurting the climate/how they can change to fix their mistakes, and guerrilla gardening.
The first two ideas are similar, but I feel like individual people aren’t sure what they, as one person, can do to help fix the world (and honestly, one person probably wouldn’t make a huge difference, but if everyone, as one person, made these changes, it would make a difference) and I’d like to show them what they can do, because I would also like to know. The second idea plays off of the first idea, which is that, really, an individual can’t make much of a difference because the largest contributors to climate change are large corporations/industries. That said, many people don’t know that or don’t know what specific corporations/industries are contributing the most, so I want to bring attention to those so people can potentially boycott them or work to force them to change their practices to help combat the problems they’ve created.
For the third idea, I wanted something a little more lighthearted and fun to talk about, because the other ideas were more heavy and dark and I’m not sure I want to research those for an entire year (even though I am very passionate about them and they would hold my interest for that long). So I want to focus instead on something individuals can do that will almost immediately make a difference: guerrilla gardening. Guerrilla gardening, if you don’t know what that means, is, according to Google, “the act of gardening on land that the gardeners don’t have a legal right to garden on, such as abandoned sites, areas that are not being cared for, or private property”. It’s taking over neglected land and making it pretty or useful. People plant flowers or fruit or vegetables, and there are plenty of websites with resources for anyone who wants to know how to do this. There are seed bombs you can buy online to just throw on abandoned, undeveloped land that will then grow local wildflowers, or you can really take a place over and just create a whole garden with fruits and vegetables. I think I’m passionate for this idea because it combines two (three?) subjects I’m passionate about: combating climate change, growing plants, and food. Also a potential fourth topic, sticking it to the man, because technically this is an “illegal” activity. Anyways, I’m not sure of an application for this, whether it’s a poster series, infographic, or website/app, but I am passionate about this idea and I’d like to see where it goes.
Honestly, I’m very interested in all of these ideas and I’d love to choose any of them and see where they go. I’ve always been indecisive, though, and choosing just one is going to be one of the biggest challenges of this school year.
