Last week my environmental collaboration class discussed how the daily bombardment of information from multiple social platforms creates slactivists. These slactivists have so many different causes streaming into their consciousness daily that they halfheartedly support issues by liking or sharing them on Facebook for example. How in this age can we create campaigns, community planning platforms, or explain systems in a way that drive people to participate and stay actively involved?
We do this, as the reading suggests, by showing and not telling them. In the same environmental collaboration class our group has been tasked with submitting to the city of Nederland new planning methods that more effectively engage the community than the policies currently in place. At this moment citizen involvement in Nederland is poorly accomplished through town meetings, which from what we have gathered, consist of a dry reading of proposed policy changes and projects. Town officials simply tell the few citizens who attend what is going on in the town, and have recognized that this is an ineffective way to communicate information.
My group specifically has found a new method for encouraging more participation in community planning through a process called "Have Your Say Days." These are community events held throughout the week that visualize different aspects of the community planning process through maps, vision boards, paintings, pictures, music, etc. We hope that by displaying important information in a way that is more attractive to the human brain than simply talking at people during boring town meetings, more community engagement will result.
Question: When you are creating information that will be presented to a group do you ever consider what it will look like from the audiences perspective, and whether or not your work would seem interesting, interactive, and engaging to yourself?
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