Design/Relief presentations
Three design teams have been exploring “creative placemaking” in hurricane-damaged Red Hook, Seaport, and the Rockaways over the last nine months as part of AIGA’s Design/Relief effort. They shared their work at Industry City, a crazy workspace/market in Sunset Park.
The teams shared some goals of building connections among local people and organizations. Their mission was to create something visible, legible, and navigable, working closely with/for the community.
As an outsider, it was fun to see the work as one big AIGA Design/Relief project, instead of three separate site-specific projects. Taken that way, the output was:
- Research methods
- focus on listening
- up to 90 hours per team
- built relationships/trust, most important thing
- Community interviews
- on site, on a regular basis
- Soundcloud archives
- quoted in guerrilla marketing materials
- edited into content for local paper
- Editorial design
- newspaper inserts, bundled with local paper The Wave
- Q&As, suggestions for mayor
- Marketing / communications
- Chalk stencils (got new people into meetings)
- Wheat paste posters
- Physical communication hubs
- Bulletin boards at the library and community center
- “official” flyers up top, under glass
- community flyers underneath (pre-formatted sheets to be filled in by locals)
- distribution team - Mini hubs to come - LED tickers in local businesses
- Digital communication hubs
- Website to mirror physical hubs
- guided input, so that details like date weren’t forgotten
- dedicated coordinator
- automated moderation (to avoid overwhelming coordinator) - Criteria for “official” events - Weekly list of top 10 events/posts
- Marketing / collateral
- Door hangers
- Buttons
- Stickers
- T-shirts
- Event spaces
- Art installation collecting “thank yous” from community
- Tourists also liked to contribute :)
- Events
- Openings/closings: brought locals together, even mid-winter
- Charettes
- Continued interviews
- Book
- Printed collection of contributions to exhibition
- Movie
- to come!
For the communication hubs, system design was the bulk of the work. How do you get people involved, get information into the system, keep it manageable, etc? Visual design was a small sliver at the end. Anke Stohllmann has a great writeup on her site: http://ankestohlmann.com/home/using-placemaking-to-revitalize-communities/
Looking forward to more talks with/from the teams!
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