After finishing the PSA, this reflection sheds light on what was learned about office reuse and its relevance to NYC. It shows how repurposing offices can help with local city issues and promote innovation and resilience, while navigating the obstacles and various advantages and disadvantages.

My group’s assigned sustainability topic was office adaptive reuse, which prior to being assigned to none of us had ever really heard of it. We first took notes on the original article that was prescribed to us and looked at all the possible areas of research that we could include in our public service announcement. We delegated tasks by splitting into four separate main areas. For instance, I researched the common challenges and ongoing efforts surrounding adaptive reuse, and others researched what adaptive reuse is and how important it is, the sustainability vision and current examples of successful projects, and the social and economic benefits of the initiative respectively. For my specific tasks, I looked to local examples in order to provide a more relatable experience for the viewer. For my part, this included incorporating the NYC Task Force on Office Adaptive Reuse to show how the city was working on the initiative throughout the five boroughs. Furthermore, I looked at the challenges associated with office adaptive reuse in the context of a massive urban setting such as in Manhattan high rise buildings. Prior to doing the research for office adaptive reuse, I never knew its true significance and relevance. After looking into these concepts and initiatives I learned that there is over 96 million square feet of unused office space in New York City, all of which that has the potential to be turned into functional and sustainable spaces that cost lower than constructing separate new facilities. I learned about the vast social and economic advantages of adaptive reuse. I learned how it significantly decreases carbon footprint and improves energy efficiency, as well as the many different ways office spaces can be repurposed for housing, recreational facilities, and many other uses. Personally, I believe that a public service announcement is a much better genre to promote public awareness of sustainability issues compared to an essay. By having visuals and moving components, with much less text, it is much more engaging for the viewer and easier to internalize and understand as opposed to reading a lengthy article that is often full of scientific jargon. The most favorable

part of working in a group was being able to take a bunch of different creative ideas and turn them into something tangible that serves a cause. However, one of the disadvantages of working in a group is organizing the time and aligning our schedules where everyone can contribute to the video all at once. To improve the SPSA project I would suggest adding other software in besides Canva that could serve as additional creative outlets to make the PSAs even more engaging.

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