Co-Design for Urban Diversity
Brief description here.
Project Outline
Within the past few centuries, our world has become hyper-industrialized and digitized. We have lost the necessity to understand and work with our natural resources, seasons, and materials, as our ancestors once had. This disconnect, I believe, is at the core of our current global crises and as designers, we need to reestablish our connection and understanding of natural materials and processes in order to not exacerbate the environmental crises.
Co-design is a design method which integrates the community or individuals whom we are designing for at all parts of the design process. It is designing with and within the communities, and not only using their input at certain points of the design research process. The designer creates the framework and facilitates the workshops or activities where the community has direct input and influence on the outcome.
Defining the Craft Thinking Process
Using the ‘Craft Thinking’ framework I developed for the Crafting the Anthropocene Workshop, we created a series of workshops where we reflected, imagined, and crafted together.
With the goal of co-designing with the community in each step of the design process, we decided to create a workshop on the theme of urban biodiversity, in order to think about and design urban spaces that can be welcoming to the diverse range of human and non-human species.
Workshop Design
We conducted this first workshop with school children ages 5-8 and their parents, and encouraged them to form multigenerational groups. Each group were to select a diversity card, which contained the agent that they would design for. With the understanding of this agent and their needs, the group would move on to creating an environment, within the context of their urban setting, that this agent could live and flourish in. Finally, we would discuss our designs and our decisions.
We situated our workshop within the Superillas (Superblocks) in Poblenou, Barcelona. The Superilla is a government-funded program in Barcelona which reclaims and transforms streets formerly occupied by vehicles into pedestrian and family friendly streets and green-spaces. We were also inspired to draw our brand colors and patterns from these spaces.
We created 9 cards representing animals, plants, humans, or insect species that are known to exist within Barcelona’s ecosystem. Each card contained a key fact about the agent along with a simple prompt that guides the participant to empathize with and imagine from the perspective of the agent.
Workshop Outcome & Insights
We planned to take the results from this workshop to create content for the following workshop. That way, we could involve different members of the community for each step of the design process, layering co-designed aspects as we go. Since this first workshop was the ideation phase, we decided to extract some shapes from the designs in order to build 3D elements, which could be used for a placemaking workshop.
We selected the designed forms and extracted them to create 2D digitized shapes on the computer. Then, we modified them in Rhino 3D to create press-fit building block forms which we printed on the CNC machine. In the following workshop, we would engage participants in a placemaking activity, where they use the shapes created in workshop 1 to build a new space within their setting.
Key Insights
Workshops should be specifically designed with the consideration of age-groups that will participate
There were too many variables in the first workshop (ie. diversity cards), could be more impactful for all participants to design for one agent
We observed the influence of childhood education, as most of the children came up with similar drawings that represented “nature”
The tools for crafting highly influenced the outcome and the method of crafting, would be interesting to try using this as a control
3D model of
