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AIGA Community Design Charrette

dariagradusova
Jan 5, 2014
2 min read

AIGA (professional association for design) invited the community of NYC to join their design charrette in re-thinking the South Seaport area. They wanted to reach out to the community to find out how people use the area, how they perceive it, and how they would like to improve it.

They invited a Placemaking researcher Susan Silberberg who is Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and the Founder and Managing Director of CivicMoxie, LLC, a planning, urban design, real estate development advisory group. Susan highlighted that platemaking by the community brings the power into the community’s hands. Re-designing an area is a difficult process for the community to start on its own, but it is rewarding. “The making process is always iterative and never finished – does not have any pressure, can be changeable with the way the community changes”, says Susan.

After the talk we sat down in teams to map out our experiences at the South Seaport. Each member of my team was thrown off by the FDR that a person needs to cross in order to get to the Seaport. We tried brainstorming ideas of how to make the area more approachable. The main suggestions of our team were to understand the place & identity of the South Seaport area among other NYC areas like Battery Park, Highline, Times Square, Madison Square Garden, and many others. Another suggestion was to integrate a way finding system to create visual navigation and information cues for people to visually understand what the area suggests and how it is mapped out.

After sharing our thoughts and ideas each member wrote their own story related to the South Seaport. The design team collected all the data and promised to share with those who is interested. I expressed my interest, waiting to hear back! This design charrette was a great way to see how other designers integrate this tool into their process. If you remember , in summer Meanwhile organized the charrette too. We gained a lot of valuable information and points of view that we are still working on. Excited to see how AIGA design team analyzes their charrette!