Week Two: Annotation practise

Cite the text here in Chicago Turabian formatting:

Sarah Murray, “A playful solution to the housing crisis”, December 2017 in Sydney, Australia. TED video, 10:42, Sarah Murray: A playful solution to the housing crisis

5 Keywords: identify at least 5 keywords within the text

• Homelessness
• Game
• house design (architecture)
• Cost efficient
• Waste conscious

Summarize: 70 words

• Your annotation needs to include a summary of the key ideas of interest to you in the text you have read. Consider the following when writing your summary:
  • What topic(s) are being discussed?
  • Can you identify the author’s key contexts? (historical, political, social…)
  • What are the key ideas/arguments being stated in the text?

In this TED talk the topics that are the main focus of the discussion are issues around the housing crisis and how creating a “game” that allows people to pick and choose how their home will look and how much it will cost (to a certain extent) and have it delivered to them can help reduce the people who are without houses due to the fast nature of construction, eliminating weather as being a determining factor for how long the build takes as the structures are constructed off site in a building and transported to site when they are done. Murray addresses the political issues of money and how this is a driver in the decisions that we make, and she also addresses a social issue of the housing crisis and how so many people are without homes due to the expensive nature of building a home, in both time and money.

Assessment: 100 words

• Assess or evaluate the importance of the text by considering the following questions:
  • Is the information reliable?
  • What position does the author take in the text? How might you determine if this text is biased or objective?
  • Did you find it an interesting text, if you did, identify why it was of interest?
  • If you did not agree with it, why not?

This information is somewhat reliable due to the fact that they use facts and numbers to back up the arguments they are making, as well as this they address a lot of common issues that are affecting more than just one type of living being. Murray throughout the text gets progressively more excited when taking about these issues and what her business has been doing to minimize these and aim to get rid of them altogether (as much as they can to a certain extent) it is because of this that the text is very subjective, this is due to the fact that Murray is suggesting that this is the only way and the best way to over come the housing crisis issue (as a promotion to her business). However, I do agree with the ideas that she is trying to make it easier for first home buyers to get a house, as well as the way she is going about doing this to minimize cost and waste so not only do the humans benefit but so does the planet.

Reflection: 120-150 words

• Written in the first person this reflective statement should identify your understanding of the text and its relevance to your research.

All in all I found this source very helpful as a starting point to generate even more ideas about how other people in the industry are thinking about how what they are doing is affecting everything else that is going on around them. I also found it very helpful to see how all these ideas of how money, time, waste, planet and humans con link together in design and be utilized in a way they is better for most. However, as this was a very subjective and promotive text I was somewhat disappointed that the negative side was never touched on even slightly, how much material of what they use is recycled, how do they handle the left over material that they did not use? I was left with a lot of questions which has helped me to think even more in-depth about my project and how I can think through all of the outcomes that I am proposing and see how they affect not only the humans, but the earth, animals and all other life too.