Today my group embarked upon the most hands-off challenge to date. Many previous adventures involved a group interpretting a challenge as they saw fit, but all envolved a greater deal of staff oversight than this one. This challenge only possessed an end goal: a map that was both accurate and informative, and that highlighted something not already mapped out in Paonia. We would be visited twice by Blake Boles who would gauge our progress, but for the rest of the 6-hour challenge we were left to complete our creation by ourselves.
Our group struggled for a bit with trying to decide what topic would best fit this criteria. We played around with ideas like mapping out what one can actually do in Paonia after 5pm, until one of our group members, Jack, came up with the idea for a map of all the best locations for a date in Paonia. Our group fell in love with this idea immediately.
We began by getting a sense of all the locations one might think of for a date. We listed the movie theater, and the town’s most fancy restuarant, The Flying Fork. We also felt that our map would greatly benefit from information one could not find on google, and for that we went to Paonia’s locals. One gallery owner provided us with some of the town’s most scenic locations, and a very enthusiastic employee at the Chamber of Commerce provided us with a list of some of the town’s best makeout spots.
Once we had our list of locations we sat down to create a distributable version of our map. We played around with a few different designs, showing varying amounts of the town and experimenting with a few different art styles, before settling on a final design. Seraya came up with a design surrounding a map of Paonia’s downtown with a heart and surrounding the heart with a few key landmarks that lay far away from the center of town. We finished off our design with a key elaborating on the benefits of each of our selected landmarks, and titled our map “Paonia: Map of Love, Date Night Edition.”
We finished our design a few minutes behind our 3pm deadline, but, looking back, it’s cool to see not only what we accomplished with so little oversight, but also how the lack of oversight didn’t feel as scary as it might have just a little over a week ago.
