This project assessed how plant-based meat substitutes can most effectively replace animal-based meat. I focus specifically on chicken, the most widely produced animal in the meat industry. 9,000,000,000 chickens are killed for meat every year in the United States, dwarfing the number of all other animals used for meat combined. Chicken production is a threat to global health,
because it heavily contributes to the emissions of greenhouse gases. An environmental justice issue arises as low-income communities with little political power live near chicken farms and slaughterhouses, which means they experience polluted waterways and local environments from the animal waste. One of the most promising solutions to end the factory farming practices of chickens is plant-based meat that is similar in texture and taste. The scope of the chicken industry demands that this solution account for scale of implementation and for the socioeconomic implications of thenah shrinking poultry industry.
Subject: Senior
Eat on the Street in Hong Kong
The itinerant hawkers and street food in Hong Kong (HK) are disappearing in just a few generations, HK’s mobile hawkers and street food are such an important characteristic of HK, but they keep losing value! Therefore, my project would like to investigate this issue and see how the street food culture can be explored and passed down. There are three deliverables in my project. First, I have created an academic written report which includes literature review, the findings from my survey and interviews, and my analysis. Second, I have developed a pop-up scrapbook which includes two parts. The first part introduces the unique traditional street food in Hong Kong’s mobile food trucks. Based on the survey I sent to residents who lived in HK in the 1920s – 1980s, I realized that Hongkongers are in love with the mobile food trucks and street food. They strongly hope both will pass on to future generations. The second part of my scrapbook includes traditional street food recipes. These recipes not only provide a comprehensive description of traditional street food, but also provides an opportunity to pass down the recipes by themselves. Additionally, there is a pattern book which includes paper patterns of street food which can cut out and fold into 3D shapes. Let anyone who is interested in 3D form of street food can make it themselves. I believe my project and deliverables can help the others to be in touch with the disappearing cultural heritage of street food and mobile stalls in HK.
Trash Mapping: Following the Paths of Our Waste
Seattle is a hub for sustainability. One important aspect of obtaining a sustainable society is to divert material from local landfills to alternatives such as recycling and composting. However, despite efforts to educate people about these choices, many people remain confused when confronted with a series of bins for depositing their trash. That being said, which bin offers the most sustainable path for a specific piece of waste? In order to answer this question, I have created my own posters that illustrate the path that items follow after being deposited in a compost, recycling, or landfill bin at the University of Washington. To create the posters, I contacted composting and recycling processing experts, visited local waste management facilities, analyzed current bin signage, and researched the role that ordinary people play in the success and failure of waste diversion. My hope is that these posters will produce a more well-informed community that cares to take the time to properly dispose of their waste, promoting a more sustainable future.
Health by Design
This project seeks to successfully integrate Evidence-Based Design strategies with J.Todd Robinson’s Hierarchy of Needs Supporting Human Health in the theoretical redesign of a standard impatient unit at Virginia Mason Medical Center’s Capitol Hill campus in Seattle, Washington. Specifically, it hypothesizes that the strategic placement of Evidence Based Design (EBD) findings on the topics of noise, way-finding, lighting, connections to nature, surfaces, ventilation, circulation, ergonomics, privacy, and social support into corresponding tiers of J. Todd Robinson’s Hierarchy of Needs Supporting Hierarchy of Needs Supporting Human-Centered Design will serve to create a stronger, more holistic design framework that is both scale-able for different institutions based upon individual resources and needs, and ensures that the design and construction of new and updated impatient unit floors successfully implements design solutions from all areas identified as contributing to patient well-being to their greatest capacity.
The project was carried out in three phases compromised of a research phase, a design phase, and a report phase. The first of which was further broken down into the subsections of literature review, site analysis, and professional engagement. Following the completion of the latter portion of the research phase, the design and report phase were carried out simultaneously based upon the results of the project’s research phase. The conceptual designs and design recommendations detailed within the final report are intended to serve as a resource for the healthcare architecture community from which architects can carry the ideas presented in this project over into the design of future healthcare facilities.
A Glimpse into Seattle’s Independent Brewery Scene
Seattle is widely known for its extensive and very successful independent microbrewery industry. My senior project seeks to document the rich culture of Seattle’s beer scene through photography and interviews with local owners and brewers. To guide the trajectory of my project, I asked myself the following question: “How is the local brewery culture of Seattle unique, and how does it build community and collaboration in local neighborhoods?”. To keep the scope of my project manageable, I focused on 7 independent breweries in particular that represent this unique community in Seattle. I conducted interviews with members of each brewery, followed by a photography tour of the facilities. My guiding questions and topics for the interview focused on how the brewery got started, their views on Seattle’s brewing culture, and how this local industry manages to put collaboration before competition. My hope is that this work will help beer drinkers better understand what they are consuming and what kind of culture they are part of, and will hopefully inspire them to explore, try new products, and meet new people. As a final summary of my project, I am creating a website displaying my findings and photographs.
Activist Poetics
“Activism” is often associated with aggression, extremism, romanticism, and destruction rendering it ineffective and polarizing. Given the unstable state of Earth’s ecosystems today, environmental activism needs to be as powerful as possible in creating change. My senior project investigated where art and ecopsychology fit into activism and how poetry can inspire action. To explore this, I immersed myself in the world of activist poetry. I read through dozens of published modern and historical artistic initiatives in addition to research on poetics, writing, and storytelling. I self-selected three books for their environmental and emotional relevance. Together, Rupi Kaur, Innosanto Nagara, and Christopher Poindexter demonstrated a power in language that articulates personal and emotional human-nature experiences. These poets respectively use techniques that conjure images of place, call on real-world figures, and metaphorically converse with the non-human. Analysis such as this afforded me tools to write what I could eventually call my own environmental activist poetry book. Thus, I have produced Each Step In– a book of my own poems, illustrations, and spoken word pieces– in an effort to connect with an audience of potential change-makers. My hopes are that readers can experience alongside with me the many emotions– those turbulent and those empowering– that come with acknowledging and confronting global environmental injustice. Bigger picture, those looking to maximize the efficacy and longevity of environmental activism can engage with rhetoric found in this book and beyond in search of what it looks like to successfully inspire action.
Somalia: Exploring Major Causes of Migration
Somalia’s challenges as a whole are extensive, seeming impossible to generate results. Social and political volatility and the coinciding of clan system with a teething democracy make Somalia’s circumstance a convoluted one. This complexity is further magnified by rapid urban growth, making it strenuous to centralize the potential advantages of a well-structured urban context to mobilize the improvement and development process. This project will examine urban migration in Somalia and help create guiding principles through resiliency thinking. Examining migration, its causes, its effects and how to better prepare for when crisis-induces mobility hits again. Developing Somalia’s institutions and helping them attain self-sustainability is the goal but for this project I will magnify one issue, migration, and help shed light on why urbanization in Somalia is being handled in a wrong manner. The final product will contain a series of guidelines that can be implemented into the long-range planning for Somalia. Highlighting the problems, causes, patterns, and ways to prevent and help the country gain stability and security. This is phase one of this project which likely will not have any guidelines.
Ending Homelessness: Effective Outreach to the Homeless Population
In metropolitan areas, homelessness is part of the community and also a problem to local government which need to address or end. To end the homelessness, the profit, nonprofit organizations and local government are providing shelter, mental health service and food to homeless people. But there are still a lot of homelessness loitering and sleep in the street. Except the help from profit, nonprofit organizations, how can we as a resident to help ending homelessness. The best is we learn how to outreach homelessness and understand their situation and experience. But what is the best way to successfully outreach homelessness? This project seeks to determine what is the best way to outreach homelessness and the barrier which will experience when outreaching homelessness, through a comprehensive literature review, interviews with profit and nonprofit organizations.
Touch the Waterfront
Seattle’s downtown waterfront is undergoing a huge transformation. The new vision, dubbed “A Waterfront for All”, removes the elevated highway separating downtown Seattle from its waterfront and replaces it with a 26-block long park that will feature green public spaces, connective pathways, a bike path, and enhanced streetscapes. To help the people of Seattle better understand this vision, I developed an interactive exhibit about the park’s materiality and ecology that will be featured in the park’s information center: The Waterfront Space. With the creation of this exhibit, I seek to introduce the public to the materials, plants, and processes featured in the park in a manner that is accessible and engaging. To create this exhibit, I first conducted an extensive literature review on exhibit design and display. I then reviewed the plans for the park to identify the most relevant elements. Working with the hosts of the information center, I then selected and formulated a series of engaging and interactive activities for the exhibit. Finally, I then constructed the exhibit and installed it in the center for public use. This exhibit creates an opportunity for people to build a connection to the future park by allowing them to physically engage with it before it opens, furthering the park’s role as a place for everyone in Seattle even before its construction is complete.
Renew Rethink Refill
Temporary use of space in urbanism can be roughly described as the reallocation of unused or underutilized space, which can act as a catalyst to enliven and rehabilitate cities and neighborhoods. Once a bottom-up, do-it-yourself strategy for the creative reappropriation of urban space, temporary use projects are increasingly integrated into many modern top-down urban planning and design initiatives.
This capstone project has developed into its final form from initial research conducted on my study abroad program in Berlin, a city ripe with a vast history of temporary space, creative-use projects. Berlin has the policy backing, real estate availability, and, perhaps most importantly, the culture that supports and encourages interim use projects –But would replication of such a project in my home city of Seattle yield the same results?
Using research on temporary use spaces, event production, and global case-study comparisons, I created my own temporary use project: a one-day ArtWalk event in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood that temporarily activates a place and provides a stage for some of the community’s cultural assets. The results of my work are summarized in a written report that describes my research findings, production methodology, and the results of a comparative analysis of the policy, real estate, and cultural differences between Berlin and Seattle that made for a more obstructed event process in our local context.