End of Week 4

Identifying team roles and project proposals

-          What happened during the ‘Team Roles’ exercises? What did you discover about yourself and your team members? What role have you adopted within your team and why?

-          What were your initial project thoughts? Which aspects of your Hulme research has the team decided to respond to, and why? What project proposal(s) have you come up with?

-          How are you responding creatively to your research findings? What are you doing practically in relation to your starting points? What action plans have you formulated as a team? What do you plan to do next?

We haven’t actually given eachother roles within the group. We have just decided on us all doing our own thing under the same title, ‘Harvesting Fragment’s from Hulme’. So we are looking at different areas within Hulme and collecting information about our chosen spots. We went round in circles at the start trying to decide on an idea, but we couldn’t settle on one idea to work on together, so this is why we are doing our own areas. With this we are gathering information from different time periods and reinterpret the information in our won way through sound, images and objects. For my own work I am photographing the social housing. To see the difference in people living in the social housing, how they interpret their own environment and use the space around them. Even though they are a community they use their personal space in a different way, some more exciting than others.

I have found out from visiting the social housing and finding information about them, that there is a community and a mix of cultures and people, such as Punks, Rasta’s and Hippies. So I am trying to capture the balconies to see if there are hints of the cultures coming out. Plans of action we have devised are that we work separately on our own in our chosen areas, then bring them all together at the end as a group of work, not just one final piece. Next I plan to edit my images captured and look more into the social housing. 

After Week 2

What have you discovered so far?

-          What do you think are the opportunities of the project and working collaboratively? (If you don’t feel motivated about the project yet what do you propose to do about it?)

-          What have been your most exciting research discoveries and why?

-          How are you working as a team? (Have you met regularly and kept in contact? Have you covered a wide variety of research activities between you? Have you fed back to your team about your findings? Have you started to make decisions in your group about further research you wish to undertake?...)

-          Have you started to discuss potential direction as a team, if so what is it and why? If not, what do you think you need to do about this? As a team do you need to conduct more research, generate more ideas and starting points? Undertake further contextual/practitioner research? Have further discussion about your interests and ways of working?...

I think this project gives the students a great opportunity to gain a new relationship with Hulme. The university plays a big part in their community and especially with the new campus being built. It gives me the opportunity to learn more about Hulme and its history and culture. Working within a team with different practices gives me a chance to learn new skills and improve working within a group. These will what I will need in later life and this is preparing me for that. I am looking forward to working with Film Making because Photography is quite similar in the sense of capturing an image and I have always wanted to work with film.

My most exciting discovery so far is the Crescents. I didn’t even realise they were there until our talks. All the history behind them such as they were used for parties after residents had left, based on the crescents in Bath, Somerset, were only standing for about 30years. Probably the main focus of the crescents that appeals to me is the mix of people you taking them over, Punks, Hippies, Students etc. I love hearing storied about what went on and the different cultures. Here is a link to my research blog for this project : http://sorrelunitx.blogspot.co.uk/ . It is where I put my research and ideas and also development work.  

I believe we are working well as a team. A girl from 3D design was finding it hard to connect with our ideas the rest of us had because she enjoys crafting and making, where we wanted to focus on making a film and documenting. We have now decided to bring all our different ideas and interests together and possibly make a film at the end. Such as the girl from 3D is interested in the history of Hulme, then the boys are interested in the music scene and present day in Hulme. We have a Facebook group where we can share ideas and links and organise meet ups. We all also have each others numbers as another source of contact. We have all been going to different talks and events and feeding back to the group after to maybe spark off more ideas. This is a good way of getting involved in everything and gaining as much information as we can.

We want to as a team go off in our own directions and interests and then bring them all together because we had some difficulty settling on one idea and area. I think this is a good plan because then no one is doing something they don’t want to do and then we can present all our own interpretations on Hulme. This way we show different aspects of Hulme that we have all discovered.