Bike Saviors, Essay Example

My community movement is “Bike Saviors” – it is a movement directed at preserving environmental sustainability, and it represents a non-profit bike shop that provides affordable used bikes and bike parts. In addition, the “Bike Saviors” shop provides the bike repair service, and provides workshops on repairing and maintenance of bicycles (Bike Saviors, 2012). According to its mission statement, “Bike Saviors” is the community recycling project that specializes in collecting bikes and bike parts from various donors, repairing them, and returning them to functionality for further sale (Bike Saviors, 2012).

2. There are various clients at the Bike Saviors shop, mainly students of the Tempe campus, who are most affected by the activity of the “Bike Saviors” movement. However, there are many other clients besides students as well. The importance of the present movement for the local community is in enabling people to save the environment by using bikes instead of cars, and in prolonging the lives of their bikes instead of throwing them out, and buying new ones.
3. My design process involved the initial choice of the development goal, which was environmental sustainability; then I found the organization to work with, i.e., Bike Saviors, and made contact with its representatives. I developed questions and ideas for the event, included alternative ideas and sketches, and conducted a meeting with the organization. After the meeting, I refined my goals through brainstorming, created the event-related artifacts, and documentation for the event with pictures and video.
4. Among the challenges I can foresee for the “Bike Saviors” movement, I can see the greater focus on attractiveness of bikes, and the inability to repair some complex disorders in bikes. In case the bike is completely broken, there is no ability to repair it, and only spare parts can be retained for sale by Bike Saviors. However, now the outlook of a bike a person uses is very similar to the level of prestige associated with the outlook of the car one uses; hence, people may be reluctant to put used parts into their bikes, since a nice-looking, new bike is often the status symbol as well.

Reference

Bike Saviors (2012). Retrieved April 24, 2012, from http://www.bikesaviours.org/2010/11/bike-saviours-safe-work-trade-2011-calendar/