COZY LAMPSHADE

Speak: day two

Investigating sewers — I’m looking at how countries around the world do or don’t treat poop, sanitation systems, and cultural dispositions. (pink post-its ftw!)

In the last few days/ classes we’ve been looking into three topic areas: sewers, cosmetics, cleaning products. I thought that I was going to look into cleaning products, but I founded that I was not as compelled as I thought I would be so I switched to sewers at the 11th hour, so I’m playing a little bit of catch up. Sewers is, of course, a better topic for me, because I’m interested in the literal structure and human structure behind it. Also poop.

In class with did a big affinity diagram/ mind map of information that everyone tackling sewers brought in. I found it helped clarify our understood communal knowledge, as well as brought up a lot of questions and pointed out holes. Eric’s looking at infrastructure, Alexis at bottled water, Jeff at community engagement, and Ka’eo was not there so I don’t know. I’m looking at poop. The mapping let us bring those areas of knowledge together. 

Overall we found the holes in our knowledge had to do with actors: who are the players in the system? Government, corporations, etc, who exactly are those entities/people? We also were unclear on the specifics of chemical/ contaminants in waterways in Pittsburgh. Additionally we needed to clarify processes and the reasoning behind processes. What is the water system treatment flow, and why is that the case?