The thirteenth day of our program was a very productive one. We started the day by deciding who would play which role in the creation of our final document. After some deliberation, we reached a consensus on the labor division and we then talked in our groups to decide how we would complete our assigned tasks. I was an editor, a job which I chose because I enjoy correcting mistakes in writing and because I believed it would allow me to best assist the group in our goal of creating a professional-looking document to go along with our plan.
After meeting with our groups, we joined back together as one large group and began the long, arduous process of analyzing which features we wanted in our final plan and which ones we didn’t. This took a great deal of deliberation, but we eventually decided that for our three most contentious issues–one-way versus two-way traffic, parking versus no parking, and bike lanes versus bikes in the street–we could avoid the messy process of deciding on which one to use in our final design by having two final designs. One of these designs would be the “radical” design, featuring the less conventional options provided by all of the design choices we could make. The other design was a more conventional one, which would sacrifice some creativity at the altar of simplicity and could be considered less difficult to implement by the city.
After breaking for lunch, we were split into two groups. Both groups were given the task of creating a “radical” and a “conventional” plan. Each group then split into two groups in order to accomplish this task quickly. I was in a “conventional” group, and we quickly drew up a plan that respected all of the constraints and requests provided. We then came back into one group and analyzed our plans that we had created for a second time in order to give the design group the feedback they would need to create the best plan possible. After doing that, we broke for the weekend.
–Nolan
The PLACE Youth Journal in Portland, OR 