Diversity

One thing to keep in mind for people who are visiting seattle or coming to live here for the first time is that for outsiders they seem to be the norm.  over 50% of people in seattle are not born here and along with that reality comes the startling realization that Seattle has a strikingly diverse population.  In this Press Release it states that washington ranks at 4th nationally in total minority population growth.  Washington already ranked in the top ten (out of fifty) in minority population and seems to be importing people at a faster rate than birthing natives.  King county specifically has the highest population of asain americans and african americans in the state.  Now believe it or not but seattle specifically ranks among the most educated cities in the country.  The percentage of the population of people in seattle with BA’s is nearly double that of the state population’s and with 17%+ people with graduate degrees in seattle one would think that the job competition here would be stiff.  Seattle somehow has maintained the average salary in the city at about 45k a year and believe it or not the most common wage is closer to 48k.  What does this mean?  most likely seattle is a decent place to work and I’m under paid .

Regardless, to an outsider the diversity and the truism of the american melting pot reality in seattle can be striking.

‘In the south it’s really clear cut, you have black, you have white and maybe a few asains.  Here you have black, white, Indian, asain, you have the whole experience.’

 

ISAAC :  It’s very transitional neighborhood. KAREN : With a diverse population.ISAAC : There’s a lot of new construction, and bringing in, you know, townhomes, which are primarily a younger couple’s…And then you know there’s a lot of older houses, that are usually like olderTwo are owned by Asians.  Three by white people.  (Karen laughing.) KAREN : I’m sorry, it’s just funny the way you said it!  Okay, delete that part. 

ISAAC : Well, the neighbors across the street are Mexican.  Neighbors down the street are black.

While the population may be diverse and different in Seattle, the tast and style of individuals here seem to blend together.  Different areas of this country alone tend to differ drastically in the way they look… in Seattle there is a pretty standard code that mandates north faces, sweatpants either high school or college branded, sandals-flipflops- or berkenstocks, and forces people to be found in starbucks with one cup of coffee and a laptop.  Why does everyone wind up dressing the same?  well it could be because of the mild weather, but who knows.

 

 

U.S. Census 2000:

http://www.ofm.wa.gov/census2000/profiles/place/1605363000.pdf

Story Draft

seattle.doc  We will start with information/pictures/etc of taiwan and the transit system there,  move to chicago and new york transit then hit seattle. 

 then we will hit diversity followed by weather and climates and then finally homeless people.

Attached to this post is a document with some quotes from the stories we can use.. from mine and lukes interviews… we can grab a clip from tony’s after this we will need to focus on building a story that transistions through all of these topics and how it is different here and what a change it is to be here.  It is going to wind up looking really journalistic.. but i think at this point with how the interviews went then supplementing that with some reporting clips that we make and some good research data will be a good thing.

Tony’s interview log

-What was your first impression of Seattle?
Chloe: I think Seattle is a beautiful city, but it’s more boring than Taiwan because……
Kaichen: Maybe there is no night life here.
Chloe: Yeah, and the food here is not delicious enough. So at first, I didn’t like this city very much.

-How you think about Seattle different from Taiwan?
Kaichen: I think the metro transportation is not convenient enough. It is hard to reach anywhere, but in Taipei it is convenient to go anywhere. You can take the bus or subway to where you want to go.
Chloe: And until midnight.
Kaichen: Yes. In Taiwan, there is a lot of convenient stores like 7-11. So I can buy food, and it’s 24 hours. But in here, it is hard to get food at midnight.

-What are the things you miss the most?
Kaichen: I miss the food in Taiwan very much, especially the spicy hot pot, and night market.
Chloe: We go to night market for some food, because there are some vendors and we can buy some snacks, and…..
Kaichen: Some cute things there with a very cheap price.
Chloe: And I miss my friend and my family very much, because some of my best friends are in Taiwan. I used to share my feeling and emotions with them, so I miss them very much. (laughing)

-How would you compare your friends in Seattle with your friends in Taiwan?
Kaichen: Actually there are not too many differences between friends in Seattle and in Taiwan. But we can meet friends who are much older than us.
Chlow: Like Kevin, Vaun, and Barrie. (laughing) And also, I think we can understand more about local people’s lives and American culture.

-What are some of the places you go when you have free time now?
Chloe: We do more outdoor activities here. We like to go IMA to do some exercise, like playing squash, dancing, and sauna.
Kaichen: In winter, we usually go skiing or snowboarding here, and it’s very interesting.
Chloe: During the weekend we play some board games with our friends and it’s very interesting.
Kaichen: And we sometimes go clubbing during the weekend.
Chloe: Especially Saturday night.

-What is the difference of your activities between Seattle and Taiwan?
Kaichen: In Taiwan, we prefer indoor activities, because the weather in Taiwan is very hot.
Chloe: In the weekend, we usually go shopping, watching movie, and going to karaoke with friends.
Kaichen: We also take scooter with friends and have a night trip. Go to mountains or some ghost house.

-What kind of people do you consider in Seattle?
Chloe: I think the people in Seattle are very friendly, kind, and very nice. Because when we walk along the street, they always give me a smile or say hello to me.
Kaichen: However, I think there are a lot of homeless people in Seattle. We can think about some solution for them like…
Chloe & Kaichen: Love and peace!

-If you had to draw a picture of a typical Seattle, what would you put to paper?
Chloe: (show the picture)
Kaichen: The first impression is the Space needle.
Chloe: It is the landmark in Seattle, so we put it in the center of the picture.
Kaichen: And I also think of the restaurant, Sushi Land, because it is beside of the Space needle. It is very delicious and not expensive.
Chloe: It rains a lot here, so we put in the rain.
Kaichen: It is very typical weather here.
Chloe: There are lots of lake, and some boathouse. There are many trees and flowers here, and we can see the running people on the road.
Kaichen: And most famous mountain and Mountain Rainier. 
Chloe: We can see it anywhere in Seattle.
Kaichen: I can see it from my room.
Chloe: And this is our impression of the Seattle.

update – Luke’s

Magnus and I have a copy of Tony’s interview material.  I’m going to do video & audio tonight, using Magnus’s question list that both you guys worked off of. 

I’ll keep my interview within the timeframe that you seem to have, between 7-10 min.  And will have text out on Friday. 

For the video, if you guys wanna go this route when we get to that point, I will start creating some animated Flash screens containing the text of individual questions.  Then we can cut to clips of what our interviewees said.  I can also start on a simple animated text intro that explains the intent of the project prior to video showing up.

Tony, that’s going to be a huge help that you know After Effects.  If we can coordinate the video cuts with Magnus’s story, we’ll be in great shape!   

Tony’s interview has completed

The interviewers are Chloe and Kaichen, and I get 6 clips of video and several photos.

My questions are here:
-What was your first impression of Seattle?
-How you think about Seattle different from Taiwan?
-What are the things you miss the most?
-How would you compare your friends in Seattle with your friends in Taiwan?
-What are some of the places you go when you have free time now?
-What is the difference of your activities between Seattle and Taiwan?
-What kind of people do you consider in Seattle?
-If you had to draw a picture of a typical Seattle, what would you put to paper?

05/01/07 *Minutes

Alright, so Tony’s gonna interview Chloe + Kai-chen together (in English, right?   And since they’re willing to be video recorded, I think we came to the consensus that each of us is going to capture video (with audio, of course), photographs, and with that will come the text stories that we’ll write later.  Don’t have to worry about editing now at all.  Just simple recording, and we can edit after the fact.   

We will be editing each one of our text stories into a single story, and editing each one of our videos/photographs into a single multimedia presentation.  As to editing, we can probably consult the tech lab in the COM school to help us.  I don’t know video editing at all, but I think Tony said he does.  I can come up with a Flash multimedia sequence that incorporates text, images, and sound pretty easily.  If we can figure out how to interlace video clips into that, we’d have a kick-ass final product.  Even if we can’t use the video, I think audio, static images, and text would make a great multimedia presentation.   

HOMEWORK FOR THIS WEEKEND : Get the interviews out of the way!   Get video + still photographs.  As Magnus suggested, we can also work from our interviews and go capture some still photos and video of assorted places in Seattle after the fact. 

We also need to start thinking about site layout…probably sooner than later- and how that relates to the storyboards Kathy mentioned in class.         

interview q’s  word

Luke’s Story Draft_text

Married couples like to say they are best friends.  Sometimes they’re not kidding.  But it is less true than the couples who say so would have you believe.  Somehow there managed to be less pop songs and rock ballads about how wonderful it is to truly like the one you love.  Karen and Isaac Hammer are two that do it.  They like each other.  And love each other.  They are aliens from
Minnesota : transplants to
Seattle from a few years ago.  And to know them, as a couple, is to know a species of marriage that is possibly elusive outside of the American heartland.       Isaac and Karen Hammer were both born in May, with their birthdays just a few days apart from each other.  They’re 29, but a recent pregnancy test has added a few uncalled for years of maturity to either of their life philosophies.  They’ve been married for three years, dated for two before that, and made the move to Jet City only microseconds after making the move to the alter.  Within their group of friends, they have one of those instantly recognizable bonds.  Like C-3PO and R2-D2, but cuter and not as geeky.         Isaac stands at six inches, five feet – a stature that’s automatically dogged him with assumptions that he’s a fantastic basketball player since high school.  This isn’t true, it turns out.  It turns out he’s the more the creative type, having nearly two-hundred pages of a draft for a first novel under his belt.  He speaks at you with an easily-intonated, nearly bass voice, and his agreeableness and general satisfaction with the universe crystallizes within seconds of hearing it.  He is lucky, you might say, to have one of those niche careers.  One of those posts in life that everyone recognizes but also one that is loaded with maybe more professional stereotypes than any other.  Isaac is an attorney: working at a law firm that’s recently moved from
Mercer Island to a brand, new office complex in
Bellevue.  (The firm’s expanding but doesn’t have the staff to justify it yet.)  So Isaac gets a conference room all to himself.  It’s his first office actually.  His work days are filled with traversing north and south along I-5, going to court, and serving as counselor for bad debt cases.  It’s a field you might not think he’d be in.  But Isaac likes it.  He’s good at it.  He’s open to the idea of jumping into another field, but he doesn’t have any immediate plans to.     Karen is blonde.  Neon, Scandinavian blonde.  But she doesn’t let that stop her.  Karen balances all the lines between frankness, optimism, warmness, and verve with startling ease.  Karen is an attorney too.  That’s how she met Isaac, back in law school in
Minnesota five years before.  But she fits the professional profile maybe slightly better.  She never says “um”.  She always looks you in the eye.  And her voice doesn’t waver in anything she says, a usual sign of confidence in oneself, which in this case is very much the case.  Her secret talent is that she knows how to talk, how to get things out of people.  She makes you feel that you’re able to confide anything somehow.  Which is probably not very good news for the defendants in her cases.  She works at the same law firm as Isaac.  But she got there first, and had a bit of convincing to the one partner that it wouldn’t be complicated for a wife and husband team to be working for him.  The sell worked.  She has her own office and has a similar itinerary to Isaac, also working debt reconciliation cases.                In conversation, when they say things, they mean it.  They mean to be interested in your goals and dreams and just precisely what you’re doing to see them realized.  You could just as easily talk to them both about the latest Will Ferrell comedy as you could about legal precedents.  Conversations with the Hammers are best negotiated over two-to-three microbrews a downtown bar.  They’re genuinely nice people.  And they’re best friends.  Really.  Even if they weren’t sleeping together, they’d be giving each other noogies or belching in each other’s face.   They’ve lived in
Seattle for about three years.  And they understand how the city works.  The understand how the people here are.  The shame here is that they are not Seattleites.  Their M.O., as a couple, is a little too alien to be normal around here. 
Seattle is a city for singles.  Married couples alone are a bit misfit.  And to see a couple that isn’t cynical, that works alongside each other and likes it, we are mystified.  And maybe we have a little something to learn from the way love is done in the
Midwest.