Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner's 2010 Kids' Clean Water Calendar Contest

Cranbrook Institute of Science hosted a Saturday luncheon for the Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner’s 2010 Kids’ Clean Water Calendar Contest on December 4, 2010.

The calendar contest is one way Commissioner John P. McCulloch and his staff educate children in Oakland County about the importance of protecting the environment is through the annual calendar contest. By giving children the opportunity to take an active part in researching the calendar subject matter, the WRC is helping to educate local children, who in turn, educate others around them.

The focus of the contest is educating children and the public about the importance of clean water. This year’s subject matter is: Kids – We Can All Help Protect Oakland County’s Rivers, Lakes and Streams. The annual event is was open to Oakland County fourth and fifth-grade students. Entries were judged on the effectiveness of the message, creativity, educational aspects and uniqueness. Twelve month winners were selected and their art featured on the pages of the popular calendar.

The WRC has received generous donations from the Great Lake Guardians to assist in calendar printing, prizes for the winners and the award ceremony at the Cranbrook Institute of Science. The Great Lakes Guardians is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and protection of precious water resources.

Comments

[Joe]

Companies are beginning to rfuoces their priorities. Ethnography is helping companies focus more on the customer rather than simply finding ways to make their employees more productive. Anthropologists are the leading people in ethnographic research. Ethnography is becoming far more valuable than focus groups, surveys, and demographic data because it allows companies to see their customers’ unarticulated desires where they live and work. Companies such as IDEO, Jump Associates, Doblin Group, IBM, Steelcase Inc., and Intel have all changed their path to designing a product. They have hired more anthropologists and claimed ethnography as one of their leading contributors to new product designs. Not all companies are using ethnography to create a new product, but rather to simply improve and existing one. For example, IDEO was hired by Marriott to study the ethnography of business people having meetings in their lobbies. IDEO found that the hotels had proper facilities for large parties, but not small groups of business travelers. Marriott has now reinvented the lobbies to accommodate a broader range of travelers. Intel does not market directly to their customers and the company believes that it needs to branch out beyond the chipmaking business. The company has begun to focus on consumer products such as entertainment systems and handheld computers for doctors. Intel now uses ethnography to learn how to make their new products appealing to the consumer. Because data-driven engineers have long run Intel, some employees are not enthused about this ethnographic switch. But they better get used to it.

[Alessandro]

, mixing more than one reerasch method is an efficient way to gather well-rounded data. The article mentioned letting all the people being observed in ethnographic reerasch know that they are being studied. If we had to study everyone shopping at Wal-Mart, or riding a bus, or using Central Campus, would we have to tell every single person that they are being studied? Or could we simply ask the Wal-Mart manager or bus driver? I think it was fun to study people at the grocery store without them knowing, but I suppose I would have felt better, and less creepy, if I would have told all shoppers that it was for a class assignment. As I read the self-guided reporting by participants, I became skeptical. Self-guided reporting seems just as invaluable as a questionnaire. When I was told to track what I do every hour of the day for a week for one of my classes last semester, I would always write a little more time down as “homework” and a little less time as “social” or “nap time.” It seems to me that a self-guided report for reerasch would be very misleading… especially if everyone acted like I did on my own report.