Read “Wakanda Doesn’t Have Suburbs,” https://time.com/5889324/movies-climate-change/ by Kendra Pierre-Louis and view Presentation 2.1 The Power of Culture and Narrative. For an optional deeper dive into Pierre-Louis’s ideas, you can also listen to her interview on the Grist podcast. https://grist.org/temperature-check/podcast-episode-one-what-wakanda-can-teach-us-about-climate-change/ For an optional related discussion about how Northern cities are unprepared for the impacts of global warming, read Specia’s article from the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/world/europe/london-heat-wave-cities.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20220722&instance_id=67336&nl=climate-forward®i_id=81107941&segment_id=99280&te=1&user_id=ccf8d634dce0638aac6e072dc0cf6aed
By Module Day 7, use the Omprakash MESH EdGE digital storytelling platform to propose an engineering innovation for the place that you currently live, which is inspired by Wakanda and the questions raised in the article.
Consider the unique geography and climate of your location as well as the methods of building and/or engineering common to indigenous or other inhabitants that lived/live in the region now or prior to colonization (this will require some external research). Your innovation may be large or small in scale. It may depict an historical innovation (i.e., what engineering decisions a society might have incorporated had it “not been colonized and had opted to live within their ecological limits”). Or, your innovation may be incorporated into contemporary society as an example of how to improve social space in a way that’s more ecologically balanced (for example, how a contemporary city like London might draw from the engineering of indigenous people from similar climates to adapt to rising temperatures).
This proposal should be demonstrated through a combination of images and narrative. Your digital storytelling entry should highlight the following content:
The identity of an Indigenous or early society that inhabited your area
A description of how this community incorporated geography and climate into their built environment
Details of what happened to this community (e.g., do their descendants still live in the area? If they left, what precipitated their departure?)
A full description of your innovation, how it was inspired by the engineering decisions of the early society, and how it demonstrates a more ecologically-balanced way of living
Please keep in mind that the focus of your innovation should be the engineering/architectural/design facets of the early society, not their culture, religious or social beliefs and values. While these social and cultural factors are certainly reflected in the society’s material culture (i.e., their built environment and artifacts), the limited external research required for this assignment simply would not allow an outsider to develop a meaningful understanding of another society’s culture.