This week, our group planned on determining our project goals, modifying our questions to ensure our goals can be reached, and identifying the intended audience and interactive component of our website. Afterwards, a meme about sandwiches struck inspiration, leading us to develop a theory surrounding the roots of immigration.
When brainstorming what our possible interview questions could be, our group decided it should revolve around the following themes: immigration, changes over time, community building, and most importantly: allowing them to tell their authentic histories as per their own personal experiences. Thus, it made sense to us to outline our goals for the project as the following: develop our understanding in the role immigration plays in social housing, develop our understanding of community building in the context of immigration and gentrification, create a space to find lost narratives of immigration, and to allow immigrants to be makers and tellers of their stories.
The group felt that the questions appropriately allowed us to achieve these goals, but we modified the order of them as per our instructor’s suggestions.
While taking a break, Gail came across a hilarious meme about the various types of “sandwiches”. This meme is attached below:
After seeing this meme, we were inspired to make something similar about the various types of immigrants. However, our version had a few tweaks. Instead of comparing purists/neturals/rebels with one another, we compared “genres” of immigrants (aka their purpose for immigrating to Canada) with how difficult their immigration experience must have been (as per our collective experiences and perceptions). The “genres” are the following, descending in difficulty: as refugees/displaced people, for better opportunities, for a better passport, to live in Canada temporarily, to join family living here. Underneath each category are examples of each type of immigrant. Our meme is attached above.
Our group wishes to use this template as a component of the interactive aspect of our website, in which users can interact with the meme and tell us (if they wish) what type(s) of immigrant they are, and how hard their immigrant experience was. To start us off, here is how UrbanEyes is represented on this chart:
Additionally, we plan on creating a website with tabs, buttons, and various surveys to incorporate the user into this learning experience as much as possible. At this point in time, our intended audience members are most likely people interested in learning about immigration, and those who are living/passing by in Regent Park and want to learn more about its history.
UrbanEyes: Ipshita, Tanishka, Gail, Lizette, Saquib, Fardowsa