Dialogue Ignites Change

Conflicts/ Resolution:

For this project we had to identify a conflict between people and develop ideas for a means to make it easier, more spontaneous, fluent, constructive and/or productive in order to create possibilities for agreement.
We had to go out and talk to members of the public about our conflicts and ideas and find out what others thought about it, this would be our primary research. We could also look on forums on the interent and in books to see if anyone else mentions the same conflict, this would be our secondary research.
For the few weeks we have for this project we will be attending group sessions to talk about our ideas and develop them and at the end we will have to present our conflict and our ideas to resolve it, in a 6 minute presentation.

To start I had many ideas for this project, but they all wern't actually conflicts, they were irrations/things that annoy me, this is were I got confused after seeing a speaker that came in named Dominic Wilcox. But after talking to tutors I got an idea of what was going on.
I decided that my conflict would be about Graffiti. How people do not want it sprayed up their walls/fences etc, and all over thier public areas. But other people want/like to express themselves, with having a sense of rebelliousness and power.
I went out and spoke to alot of people around my area/community and most people said it made them feel unsafe and they also said it was unsightly and un-inviting and they wanted something done about it as they were fed up of seeing abusive and racist words everywhere.
I also spoke to a couple of kids who liked graffiting, and they said it made them feel rebellious and they could express themselves how ever they wanted.

After this I did some research on the city council and what they do to prevent graffiting (which wasn't alot apart from they would remove graffiti from council property, but you may have to pay for it, which isn't fair to people of the public).

I also did some research on graffiti itsself, and found out there are many types of graffiti, such as: Tagging, Satanic/Hate, General and Gang.

So my idea to try and resolve this problem, was to turn a disubed building into a Graffiti Talent center, where:
Staff set competetions.
Artists can trade echniques and learn new skills, such as Photographing their work in interesting ways.
Graffiti white walls, and when these are full they would have to white wash their work, hopefully this would teach disapline and teach them to take responsibilty for their work and learn more skills instead of randomly tagging peoples walls.
Also it would hopefully show them that there is no point in tagging buildings/houses, etc, as their work would just get washed away and they should be taking more pride in their work.

This would also be a place where people from the public can come in and get involved.

I then thought about how I could possibly get the graffiti artists involved, and I thought about getting musicians involved, performances of some kind, competitions and prizes, and to get some of the work to be photographed and hung in public places, such as libraries, community centers, town halls, etc. This would hopefully give people some pride and show that they helped make their communities better places.

I then had to think about the rebellious ones, and how I would get them involved, because I doubt they would 'want' to join in. So I set some basic rules, So basically, If you get caught graffiting you would be sent to the center. If parents and schools feel their children/students are mischievious they would be sent to the cetner as an after school programme, this will hopefully teach them some respect and responsibility. And if they work hard it could be something they could put on their CV's and college applications.

Hopefully this will help stop the amount of graffiting that goes on in communities and help them become nice and welcoming to other people. And if this is successful, new projects will be introduced and hopefully the graffiti artists will want to get involved again.