The Crowd-sourced Roadscape Project
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The Symposium provides undergraduates from all academic disciplines with an opportunity to share their research with the university community and other guests through conference-style oral presentations. The Symposium represents part of a larger effort of Iowa State University to enhance, support, and celebrate undergraduate research activity.
Though coordinated by the University Honors Program, all undergraduate students are eligible and encouraged to participate in the Symposium. Undergraduates conducting research but not yet ready to present their work are encouraged to attend the Symposium to learn about the presentation process and students not currently involved in research are encouraged to attend the Symposium to learn about the broad range of undergraduate research activities that are taking place at ISU.
The first Symposium was held in April 2007. The 39 students who presented research and their mentors collectively represented all of ISU's Colleges: Agriculture and Life Sciences, Business, Design, Engineering, Human Sciences, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Veterinary Medicine, and the Graduate College. The event has grown to regularly include more than 100 students presenting on topics that span the broad range of disciplines studied at ISU.
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During the fall semester of 2014 the 32 Bachelor of Landscape Architecture (BLA) students in the traveling Savanna Studio participated in a semester-long experimental “crowd-sourced” project that was designed to engage students in hands-on site-assessment/field research for 32 separate “roadscape” sites arrayed along the 7350 miles traveled by the students and faculty during two three-week excursions. The students divided responsibilities for inventory of particular aspects of the sites (e.g. physical properties, existing plant communities, materiality, cultural conditions, climate factors, phenomenological character, etc.), documented their assessments while on-site and then later shared the information among the group in cloud-based files. Upon return to Iowa following the second trip, students chose individual roadscape sites and designed interventions (roadside shelters) in response to the site inventories, such that each student engaged a unique place but relied on the assessments performed by all 32 class members. This presentation documents the various phases of group work including inventory, analysis, and the author’s individual design proposals as developed and communicated through an iterative multi-media exploration in drawing and modeling.