When I began this project, I was excited. I loved the idea of taking a project I had created on paper and making it real. My original idea was to add a mural that a variety of students could paint on in the east amphitheater. I thought that this project was going to be amazing in every way, especially since every student was allowed to put themselves into the school's culture as little or as much as they pleased.

 

   The field trips and guest speakers didn’t poke at any questions or ideas as much as I had hoped for. It seemed very repetitive and I think my final product was affected by this. I believe that if I had gone in with more of a description of our project, I would have focused on it more.

 

   I believe that sustainable design is when you take others values and incorporate them into a work of art that would be appreciated more than it would be forgotten. If you don’t take in values no one will care about what was made but if you do then it would be used to its full potential.

 

   Speaking of values, I think the interviews that we did influenced my project because I began working, I realized more and more that I was taking them into consideration. I think that if we didn’t do those interviews my final project would not be as great as it is.

 

   When we were given freedom to come up with our own ideas I used my time well, however after all school exhibition that’s when things went downhill, but I’ll talk about that later. As I mentioned earlier I was pumped to make my prototype but if we weren’t given time to brainstorm ideas, I most likely wouldn’t have been so excited.

 

   The day after all school exhibition, I didn’t get any work done, and neither did my group. The week following was the same other than the GoFundMe page that we made. After multiple talks with the teachers, a flip finally switched in my head that the group I choose wasn’t good for me. So I switched to another group and I think that was the best thing I could’ve done. I worked with Luke’s group and helped complete the stairs and rake up the areas around it. Although I didn’t do much I felt really accomplished.

 

   Sadly, as I was reviewing the 21st-century skills, I didn’t think I grew in most of these. If I had to choose one it would be curiosity and imagination, this is because every time I looked at all of our different prototypes a new idea would pop into my head. This did come with a risk which was that the more and more ideas that came the more we bit off more than we could chew.

 

   An obvious area of growth for me is initiative. It took to long and way too many redirects to change my ways. It took me nearly 2 weeks to switch groups and when I did it showed my true power. I think next time I need to choose a group I know will work well over friends.

 

   Now, I don’t only want to focus on this one problem, so I’ll tell you a minor one my group and I solved. Everyone in my original group was broke, so we needed a way to make money. I had the idea to create a GoFundMe page. We spent a day making this, writing a description and getting a nice picture. Sadly, we didn’t make any money, but the thought was there.

 

   Another small problem we had was how are we going to make a shade structure over this to keep it cool, ideas included sheet metal, some sort of mesh out of clothing, and other things. However, the problem wasn’t addressed ever again after that, so that was definitely something we should have worked on.

 

   At the beginning, success to me was completing the prototype. If we had gotten everything done then that was it. During the project, my views shifted. Success was just putting at least one part of our original idea done in real life. It didn’t happen while I was a part of the group, but if we had even put just a post up I would’ve felt accomplished.

 

   Advice for future freshmen is just don’t work with only your friends. I understand it’s going to be insanely tempting but in the long run, it will be beneficial. Sure, working with a few friends is fine, but all friends is where things will go downhill.