Friday morning brought the first of 5 presentations to the client. These are benchmarks to see test if the research is solid and the pitch was sound. There were a few tech issues, but eventually we managed to hear and see each other at 9:30 am PST and 5:30 pm GMT.  Andrew Comer from Buro Happold and Professor Ron Leland joined to critique and offer advice to the students after the presentations concluded. Overall the client was pleased and the students had every right to be proud of all they had accomplished so far.

Next week the bar is a bit higher as we build toward London.

Thursday was prep, present, prep, present, and then repeat. It was all about refining the script, the imagery, the vocal presentation. The teams are pretty tight and ready for the big presentation on Friday...

Wednesday began with the refining of each teams 3 big ideas and one final presentation to the class of the same. The strongest idea was then selected and the digital creation began. At 1 pm Professor Jaenichen came in to present about the importance of Legibility in any city. Legibility in signage and wayfinding. The clearer and easier a city is to navigate the more welcoming it is to visitors and comfortable it is to residents. This information will be very important to us in the weeks ahead in London.

 By late afternoon the first rough digital presentations were given.

Day two is always tough. The teams start to make progress and good headway and then these are presented and are tested in the crucible of their peers and teachers. The process reveals issues, redundancies, and gaffs. The students are then sent back to the "drawing board" to try again. The days are long in comparison to other college classes and at the end of 7 hours of creative pushing brains are tired. Nia, the graphic design mascot dog, helps break up the class with times of play and stress relief, even she gets tired.

Our 5 week adventure begins again. This year we are learning about cities and what it take to make a successful, livable, lovable city that will have longevity. Our course started with an excellent overview lecture from Vaughn Davies that gave context and structure to what urban planners have dealt with and things the students should be considering and thinking about.

Following the presentation the students participated in a team building exercise - the marshmallow challenge - the goal being to created the tallest freestanding tower made of raw spaghetti, tape, string, while supporting a large marshmallow on the top. One team achieved success, one stood briefly and then fell, one showed great promise, but never would stand. It is being supported by the coffee cup in the photo.

Finally the teams got down to working. The had to pull out the research they did on the city of London, it's history, looking at what made this city have such successful longevity. At end of day each team had 3 rough directions expand on in the morning.