2019-11-9/ Cloud

 

Brief: Design an experience that addresses the democratic process

Partner: Tanvi & Alex & Chuyi & Jiayi

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Topic discussion

The theme of this week is a democracy. I think this is a very good topic that is especially worth discussing and thinking. Because of China, everyone’s first feeling is that China has no democracy. Therefore, I also want to learn about the difference between our national system and other national systems through this study. After John explained the briefing of the course on Monday afternoon, I went to the library of the school I came to check the information. In the design method introduced by John, the importance of the method of literature reviews is also explained. I must first understand the definition of democracy and I borrowed a book named design for ecological democracy in the library.

This book describes what a democratic environment is and what characteristics a democratic environment should have:

1. "potential environments become effective only if they match the patterns of local activities or if local values and behaviors change to fit the possibilities of the space."

2. "good centers are easily accessible for everyone in the area."

3. "a good center encourages frequent, preferably daily ，use and use throughout the day and evening."

4. "a good center provides places for formal and less formal community interaction and for public and private affairs，with a focus on shared activities."

5. "good centers help develop local knowledge by providing settings for new ideas to incubate，transform，and spread. "

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group discussion

Through the reading of this book, I got some inspiration. The school is a very familiar environment for me. I want to find some places worth thinking through the analysis of the school environment. In the first discussion, I made my opinion about the environment of democracy. Chuyi put forward another idea, which is about how to improve the voting system. She believed that there are some disadvantages to the current voting system. For example, the Brexit incident in the UK, do people really want to leave the European Union? It is because of a lot of objective factors, because of the lack of understanding of the matter of Brexit, or the fact that some people have different goals for voting, resulting in many divergent problems. In the end, our team members agreed that my idea would be easier to understand, so I decided to start thinking about my idea. So everyone in our group needs to find three different references, write their own ideas, and finally put them together.

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On Thursday, our team members shared their references together. Everyone has expressed their views on democracy. Tanvi's reading reference is about voter apathy. My literature is about a democratic environment. Chuyi and Alex's read are about the democracy of the school. Finally, we linked the voter apathy to the unwillingness of students to post feedback in class. Because in our class, some students are unwilling to express their opinions. And we analyse why some students don't want to give feedback. maybe the reason is I am too shy to speak, maybe I cannot totally understand the content. For some students, the most common reason is that you cannot quickly understand the content of the presentation. it is difficult for them to reflect immediately. So our design goal is to help everyone participate in the feedback stage .we designed some activities to improve this situation and go on some tests.

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Presentation 

We explained the idea of ​​feedback and literature reviews during the presentation. The advice given to us by John is that we can test our designed activities during the second day of the second group presentation.

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