Panniers in Progress

When discussing how we could incorporate community art with the BICAS mission statement, our group realized that there's a ton of potential for BICAS to expand their presence among the U of A community. The best possible ways we could conceive of to accomplish this was a combination of the following ideas:

• Promotion of BICAS via "guerrilla" style advertisement
• Creating a physical presence on the Arizona campus in the form of a free bicycle art workshop on the UA mall
• Distribution of information about BICAS in both physical and word-of-mouth form

For the guerrilla style advertisement, we wanted to spread the word about BICAS in a non-destructive, fun manner that would hopefully be a pleasant find for the students affected. Keeping this in mind, we thought that various types of spoke cards, with fun imagery like cats and the BICAS website on the opposite side, would be a great way to spark interest in finding out what BICAS is and why they found this sweet card on their bike!

The workshop on the mall, a key part of our plan, had to be something equally fun to match up with the spirit of our spoke cards. So, we chose bike panniers and other small bike bags as a craft that related to the bicycle theme, is easy to make, and could be created from recycled and re-purposed materials such as bike parts and inner tubes. Fellow group member extraordinaire, Emily, had some experience making bike bags with oil cloth, so we already had a head start in decided how we could facilitate this workshop and make it really fun and super successful.

At this workshop, we planned to not only encourage students to come drop by and make some bike bags that could be donated to the BICAS art auction, but to inform anyone who was unaware of what BICAS is and how they could get involved. So, we promoted our workshop via a series of fliers distributed around campus and downtown, in hopes that we would get the largest possible turnout of people. Our hope was that people would see our fun fliers and be curious about the workshop, or even just about BICAS and/or bicycle art, and would make the effort to find out more.

In my next post, I'll talk about how we began preparing for the workshop, including all the decision making, difficulties, and new ideas that emerged in the process.