From park bench to satellite: designing from the ground up
- 1. Thanks. In this talk, I’m going to look at issues of context and community through the lens of a long-‐term interest of mine – design for ci<es, and in par<cular, urban green space. What do I mean by urban green space? Just what you think. Any place with plants in a city – from window boxes to giant parks. I’m not a planner, nor an architect. I’m an interac<on designer. But I’m interested in the design of interven<ons in built spaces, and I think you all should be too. As industrial design spills out into interac<on design spills out into appliance design spills out into service design, ques<ons of how and where we deal with not just building scale but urban scale maHers becomes a ques<on we can ask ask and answer. I have two goals for this talk. The first is to show you how fascina<ng and interes<ng this space is -‐-‐-‐ and then second, to discuss why its hard. But don’t worry – I’ll be going over some tac<cs that I’ve found par<cularly useful. And finally, I’ll be turning back to the ideas of context and community, which animate this session. This is going to be a whirlwind tour of a big area. Let’s hope I raise a lot of ques<ons and issues that we can discuss in the panel. 1
- 2. At the moment, I’m a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. My background is in design research – research for product development, prototyping and design as a way to do R&D for large companies, and research on design prac<ce. This talk combines two long-‐term interests of mine. The first is what’s been called urban compu<ng or urban informa<cs, which I’ve been thinking about since about 2002. You can think about it as applica<ons for city life, such as the map-‐ based chat you see in the middle and a picture above that of map-‐based urban theater game I designed. The second is what’s oVen called user-‐centered or human-‐centered design. I’ve taught design research at Berkeley, and I’m in the middle of revising Observing the User Experience, a handbook of user research techniques. At any rate, aVer focusing for a while on what you might call sidewalk and streetlevel interac<ons, I got into studying urban green space largely because it seemed like such unexplored territory for digital design. “GREEN SPACE?!” People would say to me. “How is THAT digital?” I’m just contrary enough to take that as a challenge to see what there was. And also, of course, I felt that green space – parks, and especially community gardens – was something I wanted to support. Green spaces are places of beauty and play. They mi<gate pollu<on and storm damage. Sidewalks and streets can be difficult, messy places, full of arguments about traffic, rights-‐of-‐way, and other issues that come up when people bump and crowd each other. Green space, I thought. What a completely benign and harmonious topic. I had a lot to learn. 2
- 3. Since we’re in New Orleans, I wanted to kick off this talk with a story of community and context from right here. This story exemplifies some of the thorny issues involved in designing for urban green space, and with neighborhoods.. Can every one who’s seen the map to the right raise a hand? Good. Here’s the short story. In 2006, a taskforce called “Bring New Orleans Back” released this map to accompany a plan created with the Urban Land Institute for New Orleans neighborhoods. What it showed is some areas where rebuilding would continue, some areas where rebuilding would be put on hold, and SOME areas, marked with green dots, which there was a real possibility would be turned into parkland. There was a real chance, residents believed, that they would be bought out, whether they wanted to move or not. The release of this map immediately triggered an uproar, especially in neighborhoods like Broadmoor – inhabitants shown at a Times Picayune photo at left – under the shadow of the green dots. Faced with what they feared would be the destruction of their homes and their neighborhood, they revolted against the plan. Just think about that quote – “Mama, they plan on putting a greenway on your house.” What I find interesting about this map is the contrast between the specificity of the red-outlined areas, and the “approximate” vagueness of the green dots. It’s as if the real focus of attention were those red outlines, and the green dots were just…background. “Context,” let’s say, for the new development. There are two immediately obvious kinds of design taking place. One, urban planning for post-Katrina New Orleans, and two, the communication design of the poster. I would argue that there was a third process, perhaps unacknowledged but key to the success of the first two, which was the design of the collaboration between “the commission” and “the community.” The green dots backlash, I would argue, is the revenge of “context.” And community. What you think of as background may well be the central battleground of someone’s life. REFERENCES Kennedy School of Government case study: http://www.ksgcase.harvard.edu/caseTitle.asp?caseNo=1893.0 Times Picayune article http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2010/08 many_areas_marked_for_green_space_after_hurricane_katrina_have_rebounded.html 3
- 4. We’ll return to urban planning and the green dots later. For the moment, though, I want to highlight some interesting stuff happening in product and service design for urban green space right now. My motive here in discussing these at all is two-fold. First, I want to highlight some inspirations for, possibly, your own work. Second, I want to give you a sense of the richness of this space, and the number of different disciplines that can potentially get involved – industrial and interaction designers, landscape designers and architects – and of course, not to mention policy- makers and community groups. I’ve divided these projects into four themes. I’ll discuss them in order of complexity. From projects that intervene in small or brief ways in the built environment, to projects that seek to reshape entire cities and regions. I’ll be honest – I would love to spend the entire talk highlighting inspirational and exciting projects. But I really don’t have the time/ Instead, I’m going to breeze past a limited number of exemplar projects, and ask you guys to come up and talk to me or email me about them later if you want more information. 4
- 5. The art group Rebar, for example, sponsors International Park(ing) Day each year, in which people around the world turn parking spots into temporary mini-parks. The industrial design group Common Studio turns a vintage candy vending machines into dispensers for seedbombs – globs of local seeds, clay, and fertilizer that, when thrown into an abandoned lot, turn it into a carpet of wildflowers. Parisian artist Paule Kingleur mods anti-parking posts on sidewalks into tiny planters by attaching small bags of soil. These three projects are all close to traditional industrial design. What they all have in common is a playful approach to urban infrastructures, and in particular abandoned or underused spaces. They rely largely on individual initiative, and suggest ways in which passersby could also intervene. I label these projects “planting ideas” because their effects lie not in the scale of their effects, but in the way they provoke the imagination. 5
- 6. This second category of projects tries to help individuals reap the personal benefits of gardening by helping them learn to do it better. Botanicalls is a cheap sensor kit that actually calls you or tweets when your plant needs water. MyFolia is a gardening website which connects gardeners who grow similar plants or live under similar conditions. In a sense, it’s accumulating expert, microlocal knowledge about what to do, when. What is most interesting is the way in which projects like this suggest how we could start distributing the responsibility for caring for plants - Not just keep the things alive - But developing trust relationships with other people through the shared attachment to a living thing ---- Botanicalls photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbeltjones/3155923557/ 6
- 7. The third category takes up that idea of stewardship to move from Do It Yourself to Do it Ourselves, rethinking no<ons of ownership. We tend to draw strong lines between public and private space, between what we can and cannot physically access, or can and cannot care for. A few recent projects use the Internet to rethink who provides food to whom, and what kinds of rela<onships we have to property. These projects broker rela<onships between people and places. They network the produc<on and consump<on of food – and of less tangible goods. In guerilla gardening, in which an ad-‐hoc groups of gardeners self-‐organize to replant an abandoned areas neglected by the city. Or the Find Fruit iPhone app, which allows people to find publicly accessible fruit trees in people’s front yards, ready to harvest. Finally, we have a new business model – that of the distributed backyard farm, in which backyards across a city are turned into one giant community supported agriculture project. What’s interes<ng to me is that many of these projects are not objects, per se, but compelling ideas that are some<mes ar<culated as books and online forums, as in the guerilla gardening movement or urban scavenging, some<mes as a business model, as in distributed farming. 7
- 8. But what about larger, longer processes and ecosystems? Collecting and visualizing information about very local events and conditions can be used to tell stories about bigger trends. Then, how those stories are told and distributed can help form new coalitions. Coalitions that can work towards political action and commitment. ParkScan is a citizen reporting system for park maintenance violations in San Francisco. It makes it easy to get individual problems fixed – but also allows the non-profit which runs it to track government responsiveness to citizen complaints. Photographs and other visualizations of these patterns are important to collective action. They become charismatic images – images that can prompt belief, and action. Like the green dots. Landshare is a website that brokers agreements online to share cultivation of unused urban and suburban land, so that I could find someone who wants to garden in, literally, my own backyard. What’s interesting is that the website has also started to encourage and support political organizing campaigns in the UK to make the practice easier. But I think it’s amazing, in terms of doing urban food politics through the clever use of existing web technology. 8
- 9. So we’ve gone through some great examples of what designing for urban green space can look like. What I want to do now is take a step back and propose some concepts – some tools for thinking with – that you could use in your own work. Some concepts that have helped me get some purchase on the complexity of getting involved, often as a relative outsider, in spaces and places that people care for. 9
- 10. We often think of green space as a kind of “nature” in cities that is somehow opposed to technological innovation. The first thing I want to point out, which may be obvious to you, but which was not to me when I started, is that green spaces are a technology of urban living. This picture is a representation of the Air Trees installation in an arid, hot housing development near Madrid. While waiting for “real trees” to grow in, architects planned a temporary gathering place for inhabitants that would serve some of the same purposes that parks or plazas might. The circular structure is filled with rings of potted plants. The plants condition the air inside and provide shade. The circular arrangement works like a chimney, drawing hot air up and leaving the shaded area many degrees cooler – like natural air conditioning. I’m not recommending that everyone install something like this. What I’m suggesting is that we can see greenery as a kind of technology of cities. And I think this example highlights how we can see greenery as technology in different ways – as a tool to accomplish certain ends, as a deliberately engineered artifact, as a techne – a skill, of life. The ques<on is, like all designed tools, for what end? For the personal growth of individuals? For food security and jobs? For neighborhood survival? 10
- 11. Green spaces – not just gardens – connect together many disparate urban elements. They bring individuals together. They are part of urban ecosystems, working to process pollution and drain water. They are part of neighborhood revitalization, as in Quesada Garden, a one- block community garden in San Francisco that serves as a local hub for political organization and anti-crime efforts. So here’s a diagram, drawn from my research on community gardens, that suggests how many actors might be involved in something as seemingly simple as a single community garden. The closer a circle is to the big green “garden” circle, the more present it is in the physical space of the garden. It’s striking how many different kinds of actors are involved in keeping community gardens alive – people, technologies like email lists and GIS, laws about how you can use land, political parties who get involved in supporting or limiting gardens, chemicals. That’s why I think it’s helpful to think of green spaces not on their own but as networks – of ecosystems, of social relationships, of urban political arrangements. We can start to ask ourselves – who and what can green spaces connect? And what connects green spaces? It allows us to see non-humans like bees and water drops as part of the design space – and think about not just human-centered design but design for non-humans as well. 11
- 12. The next thing I want to discuss is everything that stands in the way of remaking urban spaces through design – their obduracy. Obduracy is a very useful concept coined by urbanist Anique Hommels to describe why Things. Don’t. Change. Many people have brought up similar ideas, but I think the concept of obduracy is a helpful framework for putting your dilemma into perspective. It has three different dimensions. 1) Frames – local political interests and struggles for dominance. 2) Embeddedness – the degree to which an object depends on other ones, and is in turn a source of dependency. 3) Enduring attitudes and habits – what we might call ‘cultures.’ Obduracy is an excellent way to describe what happened to the promoters of the “green dots” plan. The framing of this particular issue was very damaging – it seemed like outsiders coming in, with the help of powerful local politicians, and telling people what to do with what they saw as their own homes. But even despite the ravages of Katrina, these homes and neighborhoods were embedded – people owned their homes and had legal protection. Many of them had some insurance that would repay rebuilding. And indeed, many worked to make their homes even more embedded in the fabric of the city by renovating as fast as they could, to make their neighborhoods ever more solid – in order to contradict any idea to demolish them. Finally, there’s the culture of homeownership and neighborhood allegiance. The map of New Orleans is iconic, and people feel like it represents their lives. I would argue that people felt that their neighborhood belonged to them, and felt angry at the erasure of their love and commitment as symbolized by the flat green dots. 12
- 13. So what do we do if we want to change things – for the better? Here are three starting points – tools to think with in approaching green space and other urban issues. 13
- 14. Where do you think this photo was taken? This is Golden Gate Park -- before it was a park, before the space was completely remade. As I said earlier, we forget that urban nature isn’t natural. Plant life and greenery survive in cities because humans either make room for it, actively cultivate it. Sometimes, destroy neighborhoods for it. One way to denaturalize green space – and other spaces – is to defamiliarize it. As “to make by making strange.” This is the idea underlying a lot of the seeding ideas projects – you rethink urban infrastructure, like a parking lot. And call it out as man-‐made and redesignable Designers, of course, do this all the <me. But there are some special tricks for working in ci<es, because ci<es are so mundane and so easily taken for granted. It’s easy to believe that Golden Gate Park has always been parkland, because that’s what your eyes tell you. This is what geographers call “the lie of the land” – the tendency to assume that what you see is what’s there. So one of my primary tools in thinking about green space is the study of history. What can the victory gardens of WWII tell us about today? 14
- 15. One way to work around obduracy is to get yourself your own allies. You can read this literally – as in getting political allies. But I’m fascinated by the power and weakness of what I might call charismatic images – images that mobilize constituencies for and against the programs and ideas that they represent. The green dots map was, in a sense, charismatic. It mobilized constituencies to defeat it. It was, in a sense, a very successful map. For a different example, take these satellite photos to the right – which have been called “50 Million Dollar Photos”. Why where they worth 50 Million? On the right are two satellite photos of Washington DC. Taken together, they document the disappearance of trees in the metropolitan area. They’re pretty murky photos, honestly. Kind of the opposition of charismatic. But in conjunction with a newspaper photo they prompted a 50 Million Dollar commitment to reforesting DC from a charitable foundation. The city hired a professional urban forester for the first time in many years, increased tree planting, and drafted and approved its first tree ordinance. These images didn’t speak for themselves – they needed human spokespeople, or maybe an influential and far-reaching spokes-institution like the Washington Post, to argue for what they should mean, and why they should be important. Even if you think your work stands on its own, it will always be perceived by others as having a context. Having allies and a community. The question is, as with the Urban Land Institute and the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, whether your audience sees your allies as a benefit or a downside. 15
- 16. In 1969, Sherry Arnstein put forward this model for understanding citizen participation in urban planning. I’m not going to go into the details here – there are copies you can read online – but the rungs of the ladder move up from lesser to greater participation. I think works equally well for thinking about the agency of potential consumers and users in design. More tactical level, the question often is: what level am I working on? What level should I be working on? I often think of moving up and down the ladder in terms of obduracy. The more embedded a network is. The more tied in it is to existing physical installations, to ways of doing things. The more tendentious it is in terms of organizational frames. The more bound up in cultural understanding of the “right” way to live and be happy – the higher one should consider going. Many of the projects I’ve shown you – for example, many in the planting ideas sections – do not face particular challenges of obduracy. Projects like reforesting a city…may well. This requires a certain amount of honesty with ourselves. The lower levels of the ladder are not necessarily bad – although it is hard to make a case for therapy or manipulation – but they are often not suitable for what we want our interventions in green space to do as technologies. 16
- 17. So. Let’s return to the notions of community and context that I brought up at the beginning of this talk. When people talk about context, they usually mean “background.” Something passive. I want to suggest that in working with urban green space – or really, any kind of social design project at all, context, as it’s usually understood, does not exist. There is no way to cleanly assume a passive background. Projects spring from specific constellations of people and interests, and interact with others. Depending on what audience they reach, the green dots are either a sideshow or the main event. Community, as it’s usually understood, can be a little misleading. First, because “community” doesn’t mean agreement. Often, things that we describe as “communities” are contentious and divided. Certainly, that’s what I see in “community” gardens. Second, because “community” may not be the most interesting way to describe all the actors involved in a project. Maybe they are tax payers, hives of bees, renters, or simply passers-by. And that’s great. It means the world is more exciting, more diverse, more risky. It means you cannot take your status as an “expert” for granted, or the applause of the people you want to help. It makes the world more fun. 17
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