The Greenhill Project

For 36 weeks a sketchbook was sent back and forth across the Atlantic between two artists from Belfast and two from New York. You can view some of the resulting works via www.lookatbook.com and even buy the book too! I thought it was an amazing way to communicate with individuals from far away, you wouldn’t know what they were going to send back to you to add to.

C.Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination (1959!) tells us we should keep a diary of our lives, thoughts, things that occur to us. We can look outward and interpret what we experience and how we feel. Your views of the world are specific only to you after all! Isn’t it interesting that the Internet has provided us with the capacity to create web versions of Mills’ ideas?  However, paper versions are more than valid, particularly for those of us without regular access to technology.  It’s about whatever you are comfortable with using, that way you are more likely to stick with it.

Some community projects do this in their own way too, with the e-postcard idea; individuals create electronic postcard representations of their area and send to communities in a different part of the world. It’s a really quick and creative way to share information about where you live and who you are. www.sonicpostcards.org is a cool example of this.

I’ve been fascinated and intrigued by the work of Proboscis for quite some time. I regularly consult their Social Tapestries maps and feel that I have found another initiative that totally understands where members of a physical community are coming from, and how to encourage some kind of meaningful interaction. Crikey we’re all so different, how can you engage with people so different! Proboscis also do StoryCubes which are great to use in trying to summarise a particular interest. You can draw and print images on these cubes and tell lively stories.

Not sure if this is the original use for them, but I am going to create a StoryCube on my research aims. Can I summarise 17 pages of research objectives onto one cube?! Time will tell! I will also do a StoryCube on Greenhill. I think these resources are really useful with focus groups which are aiming to find out what matters to people in a particular community. I’ll post the results here.