Letter Writer's 3 Inquiry

For our Inquiry 3 we used Andrew's project on Great American Ball Park and the four of us all kinda chose different aspects of the park to analyze and redesign. Andrew chose location because he felt it was a very important aspect of the park and since he goes to games often, it influences him directly. Meghan was set on doing fan experience and interaction so we let her run with that. Bannon decided to focus on the size of the diamond and how it related to home runs and fielding plays. I chose to do seating because it was easy and that was one of my main focuses in Inquiry 2. We started with Andrew's powerpoint and just emailed it around as we all worked on it. We had a couple meetings just so we could kind of get a sense of what our entire powerpoint would look like and what direction we were heading in. Without going really in depth into the layout and pricing of all the seats in GABP, I tried to give an overview of everything they had to offer and some of the unique options like the all you can eat seats that they had. Going off of ticketing and seat prices I noticed that the Reds boast using dynamic pricing, which is a good idea and it is actually very useful to both the consumer and the organization. By being able to change ticket prices based on how popular they predict the game to be, the organizations that utilize this system can charge more for games that they know lots of people will come to while charging less for games that won't be as popular. You have to read the fine print on their website to realize everything they're allowed to do, but if you just read what they tell you in bullet points it sounds like you're getting a great deal. If I had gotten time to talk during our presentation I would have talked about how this not only encourages fans to buy tickets, but it encourages them to do so again and again because they know the prices will fluctuate and this way they get the best deal. Form there I was going to talk about how saving money on tickets leads people to generally spend more on food and souvenirs allowing the company to make up the difference in lost ticket sales. I was going to sum up by talking about how the entire process of going to a baseball game is powered by the habit loop. Lots of little decisions that can be made for us lead us to make those snap decisions again and again, and while we think we're acting under our own volition, there is a very powerful subconscious influence that is swaying our decisions.

Trixtopia

We had a kind of slow start to building our city... I think everyone in our group is pretty much done with school and trying, so we made a beach town slash spring break city. As soon as we decided to make a beach town, we basically figured it would be restaurants, shops, and hotels. As we deliberated more on it, we figured we should add a couple things like residential living, and civil services so that the city would at least have a couple inhabitants year round. We ended up having a couple restaurants, bars, hotels, a shopping center, a dolphin sanctuary, two residential buildings and one very large police/fire station and hospital. The entire experience made me realize a couple of things about city planning. First of all, even small towns are divided up within themselves. Much like Goggin Ice Center tries to differentiate experiences and baseball stadiums do too, so do cities. Our town was basically cut in half, one half for the tourists and the other half for the residents. We put clubs, restaurants, and tourist shops by the hotels that vacationers would stay at and we the grocery store and police fire hospital by the residents. It made me realize how people both don't like change in their lives and at the same time need it. That's why people take vacations, they want a break form their normal daily routines. And when they are on vacation, they do not want anything to remind them of their normal life at home and the stresses that come with it. At the same time, when people reside in a place, they don't want to be bothered by tourists, people who exploit the place that they call home. Furthermore, the project made me realize how coveted nature is and how easily exploitable it can become once people start seeing dollar signs. Additionally, when individuals realize that they have the opportunity to create a "unique" "natural" setting, they can do so and make money off of it. that's exactly what we did, we decided to create an inlet in our coastline and then almost immediately after we did that, we put two enormous hotels on either side of it. It wasn't even like we were going to make money off of our decision, we just did it because we figured that's what would happen if this city were real. All in all the project brought to light a lot of things I had never really given serious thought and it made me realize a little bit of what goes into city planning. Granted our town wasn't really a town at all... more of an imagined space that we all wished was real. Had we made our city bigger, I feel like we would have gotten a better idea of all the details that go into the logistics and economics of city planning, but it was still fun.