2017-2018 School Year

Hello BLUElab Thailand,

Foremost, I apologize for getting around to this so late (not just cause it is literally past midnight in Chiang Mai atm), I promise we were still preparing for the trip around and after finals. BLUElab Thailand is now a year older, (2.5 year birthday?) and thank you for your time and participation this year with this team and project. 

After a promising needs assessment trip in May 2017, this team juggled idea generation, mass recruiting, leadership transitioning and prototyping for the first time. Yet on the other hand we’re sending Ava, Tay and Huayun our best wishes as they graduate, people who have been pivotal players in forming and progressing our team. We’ve helped with the start of a remote partner student group: PURPLElab at CMU and with the help of people like JPH (who will be joining us at the end of the trip) we’ve strengthened our partnership and communication with Chiang Mai University. 

The team is still growing. And likewise, as incoming leads, Alex and I are still learning. We’re looking to challenging ourselves to devise and test more designs in the future (we’ve had journal prompts for short and long term plans) and hope to satisfy a needs statement within a year or soon! Still, we’re were pleased to have introduced the design leadership and Meagan, Priscilla and Quan have adeptly and remarkably conducted and paved way for our preliminary prototyping (as I review this I’m listening to a CMU professor evaluate Tay’s design which is a really cool stage) and I’m proud to have our design team as we consider future solutions and designs and hope to continue to be a part of the conversation and implementation.

The travel team has now all arrived in Chiang Mai and hit the ground running crafting plans with our CSED consultant (Christie Donahue) and we are spent all of day 1 (Sunday) training PURPLElab on socially engaged design and giving them a background of our team and its prior operations by having her present the CSED workshop material. With Day 2 today, we elucidated our needs statements and had them run through our creative thinking strategies to get fresh ideas (idea generation), and they were receptive and interesting. From team bonding, they seem close and pretty friendly. We are getting around to social media and juggling other priorities in line first as we hit the ground running and leave for Mae Chan in a day.

We’ll keep you in the loop here in Chiang Mai; thanks for continuing to follow us!

Sincerely,

Alli 

Incoming Project Lead with Alex ! ! !