Candy Chang and How She Has Inspired Us

I have to admit when we first got this assignment I wasn't sure how much it was going to inspire or engage me. However, upon purusing each and every one of Candy Chang's projects I was inspired to be just like her. I love how connected she is with the community and how much access she provides to people who may not normally have had a voice. We all have opinions, and sometimes it's hard to know where to go and express them in a healthy, productive way. Well, this is exactly what Candy Chang has provided for so many people. A place, easily accessible throughout a normal day, to write down how you feel and share that feeling with others. I think we need more of this in our daily lives. I would love to do something like she did with her "Looking for love again..." project. There are many buildings in the downtown area that could be renovated and made beautiful again, and figuring out what people want to see there is a critical first step! Please visit Candy Chang's website, and see the magic for yourself. Here's the link : www.candychang.com/projects/

I strongly encourage anyone who believes in the power to inflict change, and even if you don't, to look at all of these projects, and I invite you to discuss with me anything that comes to mind once you look through them! We made a list in class of all of the things that Candy Chang's projects made us think about, and then used that list to come up with a project for our class, The Valley as a Laboratory. We decided that making a collaborative website with all of our individual projects would be a great thing for our class to work on to create a more compassionate, sustainable future.

I think that creating a website as a traveling exhibit would be an excellent idea. Where my mind goes with this is that each of us have an individual project that we update those involved on using our website. This will offer access to more sustainable Salt Lake Valley through many different projects. Keeping the public updated and getting our message out to the community is essential and I think in this current age of technology a website is a great way to do that! I had an idea after class that I think would be wonderful for us to do. Maybe twice a month (or more), we create a physical exhibit for people to come and learn about what we are trying to do, with maybe one or two of our individual projects. We could try and make that exhibit contain every project, but I think that could become slightly overwhelming. It would be a way for us to get the word out about what we are doing, while also expressing our ideas in lovely, creative ways!

My individual project will be concerning light pollution. The thing I would like to do most of all is get information out about the problem, and then maybe coming up with a way to secure a solution. I'm not sure many people know how affected we are as animals by this issue. Not only that, other species are also highly affected by light pollution, and there is an easy way that we can erradicate the problem; get the lights to point down towards the ground instead of up into the sky! I think that over my holiday break I am going to create a survey, just to see how much the general public really knows about light pollution, and then maybe a pamphlet about light pollution. I would like to create the pamphlet using illustrations, just to spice it up, so I think I will be recruiting some of my more artistic friends to help me! It's going to be fun, I can already tell!