Engaging Community Residents in a Design Process
Reimagine Spaces was a project centered on informing residents of the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood about future changes coming to the spaces in their neighborhood. This project was a response to the number of alterations to parks, busways, main streets and plazas done without input from neighborhood stakeholders and residents. The small percentage of community members who do attend neighborhood planning meetings should not be the only ones privileged with knowing the changes coming to their neighborhood. All residents should be encouraged to engage in the process of planning and developing their own communities. The system of artifacts developed for this project aimed to meet these goals.
(Concept rendering for fence installation)
(Initial designs for the yellow “Possibility Tags”)
Possibility Tags installed on a fence next to the entrance of the busway. Each tags has a different possibility written on the inside. These possibilities included ideas like “A safe place for kids”, “Sunflower garden”, “A corner store”, “A place to buy healthy food”, etc. These possibilities were generated based on feedback from community leaders and residents.
Residents were invited to remove a tag on their way to or from the busway, read the possibility on the inside, consider their own opinion about the busway space, and then navigate to the Bridging the Busway website to find out more about how to become involved in the project.
Since the inception of this project, I have been able to network with a number of people in the Pittsburgh community who are also interested in engaging and informing neighborhood residents about the planning and design processes. For this project, I partnered with the Studio for Spacial Practice to create this dynamic communication artifact for an East Busway stop between Homewood and Point Breeze. This system was comprised of take-away cards installed on the fence, each containing a possibility for the busway area and the Bridging the Busway project website (made by the Studio for Spatial Practice), which displayed dates and times of upcoming community meetings and charrettes for the project. The system was meant to spark interest in the redesign of the busway area and inspire Homewood residents to become active participants in the design process.
The Removal of the Possibility Tags
I returned to the Homewood site each week to document the removal of the yellow possibility tags. Below you can see the removal of these tags by Homewood residents over four weeks.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
I like how the snow decreases along with the yellow possibility tags!