Last week we presented our completed field guides to the class and listened to feedback on our work.

Overall I now feel pretty disappointed about the field guide I made. I worked very hard on this, both on the actual research part and the making of the finished product, but I don't think that hard work is perceivable in the final result. I am happy with what I accomplished, but those accomplishments are internal to me and are not something other people will perceive or appreciate.

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At last, I have completed my Home Ownership field guide. I am pleased with the end result.

The final version is similar in look and feel to the Draft Field Guide. I made some improvements to the text and futher developed the illustrations. I did all of the illustrations using Adobe Illustrator, with some inspiration drawn from Noun Project.

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In class we have been studying Semiotics, which is the study of meaningful communication through signs and symbols. The final version of my Homeownership field guide needs meaningful signs and symbols to help the reader process and remember the information.

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Building on my reworked taxonomy and field guide entries I created a draft version of my field guide. I'm pleased that this is coming together in a way that makes sense and that I'm comfortable with.

In last week's post I tried to organize the information to be presented into a hierarchy of some kind. I explored several maps showing the relationships between the different components related to the life cycle costs of home ownership. Although I did a good job mapping the information, there were a few problems. The biggest problem is that I was moving this project in a direction I don't want to go. Specifically, I don't want this to result in a business-like presentation that somebody from an MBA program would produce. Not that there is anything wrong with such presentations; educating people about financial literacy and home ownership is a critical function that somebody needs to do. The problem is that doing that would be painfully boring for me. I worked in the finance industry for too long and I really wanted to do something else for this class.

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Continuing my research on the "Life Cycle Costs of NYC Home Ownership," my next step is to create a taxonomy and draft field guide entries.

Before exploring the details of each I wanted to first discuss some higher level concepts to get them clear in my mind. First, in last week's post I was concerned that this project would become tedious and boring as I presented real estate financing details like ground leases and the mortgage tax. Rather than go in that direction I would rather bring these concepts to people's attention but then direct people to other sources for the detailed information.

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Our first topic is to create a field guide on some subject to contribute to a collection of Energy Field Guides. The field guide will be small pamphlet or zine. My randomly selected topic to research is "Life Cycle Costs," which I understand to mean both the visible and hidden costs associated with some entity or thing.

It wasn't immediately clear to me how my topic relates to Energy. I would have preferred to have a topic like Nuclear Energy so I could research the various technologies humankind is using or could be using to generate electricity with nuclear fission or fusion. But Life Cycle Costs? What does that mean in this context? In class I inquired further and was told by Marina to think about the hidden costs of ownership of something.

After thinking and exploring I decided to research "Life Cycle Costs of NYC Home Ownership."

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