Tommy Thompson Park

Today we had an in-class visit from Rhiya whose goal was to provide us with feedback.  As a group, we briefly went over our journey from initially being put into a group and given our culminating task, to where we currently are with ut propro chart. Rhiya gave us great feedback specifically challenging the way we define our public model. A public model takes shape in many different forms when it comes to parks. Baycrest Park falls under a public model where visitors are free to roam with little to no restrictions. However, Tommy Thompson Park is also a public model with many restrictions placed on visitors. There was a disconnect between what we felt like a public model was versus what others felt a public model was. We quickly realized that for our benefits to make sense we need to verbally describe what a public model means to us. Another big thing Rhiya touched on was our habit of assuming other people's actions and feelings. We did this a couple of times with our benef...

Week 5 has now passed and the Libras are killing it. For this week we worked on making a propro chart and stakeholders chart for Tommy Thompson Park. Starting off with the propro chart, we first thought of our opposing models. The models we came up were public parks vs. private parks. Then we continued to brainstorm ideas for defining the differences between the two and what the benefits are of each. From this, we moved on to our stakeholder's chart. The four stakeholders we found were most important in the parks were the organization itself, the people who come and visit the park, the wildlife in the park like the trees and animals, and the research who come to park to expand their and the knowledge of other people. From all the information we got from both the stakeholder's chart and propro chart, we put everything together to make little thought bubbles for the propro chart. The thought bubbles were evenly spread throughout the group. The job for the Libra...

Libra’s Take Over Rotman? Steps Moving Forward?? Libras Inc. takes Rotman School of Business - what a way to start off the first day of December huh? The trip to Rotman was a very insightful one, one that we can say impacted us in more than one beneficial ways. To our dismay, we had to meet very early, but in the end, it was worth it - we took away so much more than we could’ve ever imagined. As Calvin said, PERSEVERE! The first half of the morning we spent with Nogah Kornberg, who is an integrative thinker who works very closely with our teacher Ms. Essabhai. First, all three groups went on their journey with Nogah and vaguely went over our tensions in order to get some insight, feedback, and guidance when moving forward. Our group has finalized our problem statement: How do we create a harmonious, but welcoming, an environment where we’re preserving wildlife BUT also enhancing human interaction and recreational activities? The tensions within that that we have ...

On Week 3 each group was given a stimulation in order to exercise our integrative thinking as well as leave us better prepared for our final project. Our stimulation was called “Bellas Ice Cream Challenge” and to sum it up, our goal as a team was to find a solution where Bellas can continue to be a brand that makes the effort to be environmentally conscious while also maintaining financial stability. As well as forcing ourselves to use innovative and critical thinking in order to come up with a solution that does not involve compromise. The stimulation lasted about a week and a half and the process that this activity entailed was much more challenging and meticulous than we all expected. We started off this challenge with a video where the CEO, Marketing Director, and Chief Financial Officer explained the situation from their point of view. We were then given the main tension within Bellas Ice Cream Company: should they choose to move further with their company that is facing ...

In week 4 Libras Inc continued working on our side project with Bella's Ice Cream simulation. Like mentioned in the last update, the goal of this side project was to use innovative and critical thinking alongside the tools which produce and simulate integrative thinking. This includes defining each of the models in the tensions, using a propro chart to evaluate the benefits for each model, creating links between these benefits and eventually coming up with a new and improved model that Bella's could use to save their company. The point of this exercise was to explore the tools of integrative think so they can then be used in our main project.   Some other things we did is explore the few tensions even more by emailing some local parks in hopes of gaining insight on how they run their parks. This research will enable us to explore the various models when it comes to the park industry so we can incorporate that into our final project. We also continued and finished our l...

After a long awaited time, our group has finally come up with a team name. the team name that won by a majority vote is Libras INC. the reason for why we have chosen this team name is because we feel it really describes our views on the park. Since our main tension for the park is how we can create a harmonic balance between humans and wildlife, we felt that Libras would be a perfect name. The meaning of Libras to be cooperative and social, and the word Libra is a perfect way of summing up our tension in one word.

Our group has made a couple of changes to the website to match the season of fall. The first thing we changed on our website is the main picture you first see when you come onto the website. The picture is of a park in the fall season with the trees changing colours. The second change we made is the main colours and the theme of the website. These were changed to something that will relate to the picture so the website seems as one, and everything looks uniform.

  Week three was a calm one! We only worked on a few little things for our final project, the main one being conducting research for some of the tensions we've come across in relation to Tommy Thompson Park. The five tensions we've decided to further expand and research include dogs’ vs the wildlife, cyclists vs wildlife, research vs. recreation, public vs. private and construction vs. wildlife. We have split up the research to try and figure out what are the bigger tensions out of the few. This process will allow us to categorize and place tensions within another so we can come up with one final MAIN tension which we will use for the integrative thinking process.   Through this, we have also started a simulation consultation for another company called Bella’s Ice cream. As a team, we're trying to utilize integrative thinking to help the company make the BEST choice so they can thrive moving forward. Bella's main tension was whether to go mainstream like their...