March 14, 2022
As part of our FYDP/Capstone 2022 spotlights, we’re excited to introduce team 8 from Systems Design Engineering: Mickey Dang, Queenie Wu, Jenny Xia, and Sienna Wishart and their project “FieldNotes”!
Can you explain your project in one sentence?
FieldNotes is a geospatial tool for facilitating participatory planning and meaningful engagement with communities on municipal project proposals that helps develop more representative outreach plans by identifying local partnerships, and unifying existing reports across department silos.
What has been the best part of your project so far?
Each of us come from very different backgrounds through the technical electives we picked and our co-op experiences. It was exciting to work together and bring each of our own unique perspectives in engineering, design, and art towards a shared goal; especially when it comes to building something as open-ended as a geospatial visualization tool.
What is the biggest challenge you've faced during your project?
One of our biggest challenges was developing a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the problem space within urban planning. Given our relative unfamiliarity with the domain as engineers, it was important to be open-minded and identify what was a problem worth solving using technology. Technology is not always the solution to achieve equity, and that principle continues to drive the team’s conversations regarding design decisions and how data is used in our tool.
What's next for your team members once you're finished?
Our team will be starting fulltime work after graduation in software engineering, hardware engineering, and product management; however, each of us have our own various creative and academic pursuits, so we hope the future also includes grad school, international travel and cartography.