Phase 4 - "Designing and Cleaning"

With the information collected from the previous phases we were now able to understand and judge the qualities of the different meeting points from a more personal perspective. Each site presented enormous potential, but it was time to reduce the number of areas in order to focus on those that could have the greatest impact to the community. We visited each site one more time and compared the feedback we had gotten from the residents with our own perception and chose three of them: the Rotary court, the football court 2 and the Boxing Court.

By developing a set of workshops that could work as communication interfaces between the community and us, we tried to understand more about the community, its people and the direction of our future steps.

The workshops were aimed to everyone. However we started working with kids because they are easier to approach and don’t have so many life conditions to worry about, compared to the adults. The workshops focused in two main processes - designing and cleaning, which come from thinking and doing.

Having workshops in 3 different areas has introduced us more and more about the people, the character of the areas and the stories behind them. These are considered very important information that we need to know and understand so that we know what the next process should be and what kind of tools we should use to deal with the situation of each place.

From the workshops on 3 areas, it seemed that we were more connected to the people in the Football 2 side than the rest. The number of people interested was not the first criteria considered in this case, but the will to start and really want to do something that they showed us was more important to tell us where the next step should take place.
Second, the capacity of the adults in charge of the children through the workshops we had together was the second criteria as it is very important that we, the outsiders, are not playing all the roles of the activity. Some roles have to be shared and we do not know so much about the character of the children and how to control them, so we need them to help to flow the process.
Third is the group of people who are willing and interested to improve their area still remains the same faces. This is very important for the starting process as it ensures us that they are learning and improving together with us, otherwise we have to start it again and again and not moving to bigger steps.

In this post there is no reference to how we did these workshops in each place, considering that the first posts in the blog present them with text and stop motion videos.