Day 1, Reflective Statement

Monday, August 27, 2018

Theme: Problem Identification

 

e-Crop.91 (Code name: Raindrop)

 

Small experiments with radical intent.

This is the goal of the course. When you read it it makes perfect sense, however, as soon as I turn to look at the problems we are faced with, I completely lose track of this. This is because all I can see right now is the big picture, with big experiments, and because we can’t look at solutions yet, small experiments aren’t on my radar quite yet.

 

Today one of our groups failures was that we chose a problem right of the bat, before even asking the ‘How Might We’ questions, but of course once we did the HMW’s our focus completely shifted. In the beginning we thought, let’s do something completely out of our comfort zone, something we know nothing about, and we decided to do the food/medicine one. However, once we started asking the HMW’s, we realized we had very little questions towards this challenge, as well as the meat one. The most questions surrounded farms, and food waste. Don’t get me wrong, I would pick food waste any day. But as mentioned before, taking a step outside my comfort zone, and learning something new would be good. So we chose farming! The main issue moving forward, was the knowledge that I have to wait two days until we can start looking for our solution. This poses a big mental challenge, because in UNIV 201 we were given the challenge day one, and told to come up with as many solutions as we could. I get the process, questions are very important and need to be asked and addressed before moving forward, but still, it’s difficult keeping all the ideas locked at the back of my mind. Needless to say, I’m excited for Wednesday.

 

Help Small Farms Grow.

This is going to be a tough one. To address this challenge I really needed to understand what this meant. A lot of questions can be asked just for that little statement, How do we help the small farms grow? How many small farms are we helping? How small are the farms? Where are the farms located? How are they growing, economically, in technology, in crop yield?

These questions will be answered as the week goes on. Our big questions, that goes along with our problem is “How might we customize big data to specific farmer needs?”. What we’re looking at is what can we do to help these farmers be more efficient while not imposing western ideals or using inaccesible and unaffordable technologies.

 

Today was a great start to an exciting and stressful (in a good way) week!

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