Today is the last day of the IARU program and we have group presentations and individual presentations. Because my group was the last group, we had to wait through a lot of presentations before we got a chance to share our work. Many of the presentations were quite interesting, although I felt that our group made the most significant changes/improvements to our project overall with our work on the case studies. The presentation went pretty well, although I felt that my group made me spend too long on our matrix slide. Nevertheless, it was an interesting process. We had someone random come in for our evaluation, as is required by Denmark law, and he asked really long, really awkward questions to each of the four groups before mine, but didn’t ask my group anything. I felt kind of strange about this, since I was hoping for a chance to explain a variety of things about our project.
We then had an individual evaluation, which was awkward because it was my understanding that we would be presenting to everyone what we had learned. Instead, they called us into the room one by one, had us present what we had learned, and then asked us some random questions to check our understanding. Overall, I think that the grading system in Denmark is quite strange and wasn’t very transparent to the students. While certain aspects ensure fairness in grading in theory- such as having an outsider evaluate to prevent lecturer’s own opinions from getting in the way of grading- the actual implementation was less than ideal. Overall, the grading ended up in a sort of bell-curve, with A’s, B’s, and C’s (most students receiving B’s), but there wasn’t much in terms of explaining how the grading happened. Ehh, I got a “B,” so it doesn’t matter too much.
During my individual presentation, I shared this (this is written in speech format and answers three key questions that the Professor asked):
“Hello again everyone! So, as you heard before, my name is Stephen Chiao and I am a part of group 5. My group’s main landscape issue was finding settlement and housing methods that would preserve the best of rural and urban qualities in an area despite the demand for new housing.
Within this, I think that the most critical aspect would be satisfying what the people want from their living spaces, whether the concern be economics, sustainability, climate change, or implementation, the people serve as one of the most important advocates or barriers to landscape planning.
In the case of finding the ‘most strategic decision’ my group made in shaping a landscape response, I think that the decision to move from creating a ‘NEW’ type of ‘garden city’ to just identifying a range of possible solutions particular to landscapes in Hillerod instead was definitely what enabled us to sort of ‘move on.’ While a ‘Garden City’ would have created a great vision, as well as draw upon some historical successes, none of the people in my group were professional landscape planners or strategists, and it was better not to try to create new settlement plans and housing types, but identify and evaluate existing strategies that could be utilized to achieve our goals instead.
Finally, as for the most important lessons that I have learned from the process, I think that identifying what not to do was often as important as identifying what we (as a group) wanted to do. When we started out this project, we had all sorts of ideas- creating new housing types (maybe using combinations of existing ones), considering adding rural-skyscrapers to possible considerations for development, or going micro-scale and identifying what structures or aspects could be added to each type of housing, such as white roofs and water retention tanks, to where they could be located… it was basically too much. Overall, it took a lot of effort to get our group settled upon what we really wanted to focus on, so I think that learning about what not to do is an essential part of what I got from this process.
Oh, and matrixes are cool too.
Thank You.”
I know, not the greatest presentation in the world, but the questions were a bit unclear and we were given only a limited amount of time to present. We were supposed to answer: “(a) What is the most critical aspect of the landscape issue your group has been working upon? (b) What was the most important strategic decision that your group made in shaping a landscape planning response (c) What is the important lesson you have learnt from the process?” and if Professor Swaffield had not clarified, I would have though the questions asked “(a) what is your problem statement? (b) What got your group moving along? (c) What did you learn from the project?” it was all quite confusing, and I think that a lot of people needed this to be clarified.
After this part, we had some free time and the evaluator made us all get in a group and write down what we liked and disliked about the class. I think that many of the people in our class wrote many similar things, so there was a suggestion from one of our students to just have a discussion and make things more comfortable, but our evaluator didn’t seem to like the suggestion and proceeded on circling things he thought were interesting and we did things the boring way.
There was then a bonfire held by some of the local Danish people, and we had a fun night before we had to head off to bed to pack and get ready to leave.
(Bonfire #1. So Much Fun :))
(Hiking With Friends)
(Group Picture! I missed it :/)
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