6:40 AM: I woke up for my morning jog around the Waterloo campus, wondering about what kind of design project 2012 Shads were supposed to tackle. We learned about it soon enough, after a ridiculous amount of anticipation-building: "How might we reduce or prevent obesity in North American youth?" It's such a current and relevant topic! I couldn't wait to get my design group assigned!
We didn’t get assigned to our design group. Our staff loves to keep things secret for surprise purposes. We had a public-health guest speaker and we continued with some preliminary design exercises in the afternoon, but the solutions I came up with were just so boring…
We later had a special community dinner with all the residents of Conrad Grebel residence and another guest speaker about carbon-pricing and business plans, followed by a recreation session.
We ended the day with a feedback session about today’s design exercise, followed by a late-night snack. The source of our difficulties was our self-censorship hindering our creativity; we were afraid of throwing out crazy ideas. We never realized that even an astoundingly ridiculous idea can serve as a diving board to generate many more ideas and be so much fun! Out of the sheer number of ideas, maybe we’ll find a great one.
I’m tremendously excited about the potential of what we can create with such a brilliant and multi-talented community!
Gordon Hua, Shad Valley Waterloo 2012
