Final Blog Post

Through this project I learned that people are willing to create community with complete strangers with little help. At the Town Green interactions between people happen all the time; between vendors and consumers, dog walkers, and during events. Our jobs as engineers was to keep this sense of community lasting longer. This how I also learned that community is greatly affected by the physical design of an area. At the beginning of this project I was wondering how community related to engineering. I later realized that the two are a pair. Many public areas are designed the way they to make people feel comfortable and more willing to talk to strangers.

The main reason our project team was functional and successful was because we split into even smaller groups. Although we had already been assigned roles (team leader, media and marketing, and engineering), our team decided to have two or three people on each instrument we were building. Not only that, but the team leaders were always available to help whichever group was falling behind. Another reason our group was functional was because we had such great leaders. They kept us on task, but also let us have our jokes and fun. They were not too over controlling and trusted us to complete whatever job we were given.

 I really liked how the three flowers came out. Our final product fulfilled the goals we set out for it and looked aesthetically pleasing like we had hoped. The number of instruments and size of the drum flower require multiple people to play them. When there are multiple people, they try to make a song and play with each other. The bright colors also attract people without standing out too much at the Town Green and are not overwhelmingly loud. There could be changes made in the construction of the instruments to make them sound more musical, but we did the best we could. Overall I feel that the prototype worked successfully and created community.