Senior Studio 2016

We spent several weeks refining our concept after the consensus group meeting with the feedback that they had for us at the forefront of our minds. We also went back to the drawing board when it came to the vignettes because we knew that while this concept is pretty up in the air, the vignettes were going to be the substantial portion of this project because they encapsulated our vision and design principles that we felt the people wanted after our research.

The community in the Hill District is incredibly focused on improving the community. It’s inspiring to see so many people come together to work on this project whether it’s through the side conversations at the consensus group meetings to the more intentional meetings with Terri and the Youth organizers. We hope that the CDC will put into consideration our ideas and our vision of what the Court of Ideas can be and incorporate it into their master plan as part of revitalizing the Hill District. We hope that even if the final form is not the same, that the design principles and activities/programming will be present in the new Court of Ideas.

A huge thank you to the people who were involved in this project and for pushing us all the way through the semester!

Incorporating Feedback

From the consensus group meeting, we got a lot of positive feedback. One of the points that someone brought up was the issue of safety - how can we design a space that discourages crime? We realized that our current design had a lot of “hiding places,” or visual barriers that could be a host to criminal activity.

Here we are presenting it to the community! We got positive feedback and questions about the safety and funding for the project. A few of the slides are included below!

We met with Josh Welsh, a landscape architect who works on Yosemite National Park. He told us to focus on “broad gestures”, minimal architecture that focuses on community programming to activate the space. He also pushed us to refine our designs with safety in mind and the seasonal usefulness of the space.  

We also met with Terri who pushed us to tell our story with the community conversations at the forefront. She linked us a few interesting photos that showcase the community programming present in the old Court of Ideas!

We primarily focused on more detailed work on the layout and making it wheelchair accessible.  Continuing from last week, we visited the Court of Ideas to get more accurate dimensions and slope.  This helped us make more accurate drawings and work on making the space more wheelchair accessible. 

We kept the same types of spaces that we wanted to keep:  An open place for eating, a quiet/cozy space, and a place for community/art.  We used intersecting lines to divide the space and create a triangle in the center.  We then worked on making the space accessible with stairs, steps, and ramps.  To make the quiet space, we divided the side into smaller terraced spaces.  For the community space, we created large steps, and left the top for art and other public activities.

Our second pass at getting a final layout. The bottommost image represents our most updated version - We’re trying to play off the idea of a crossroads, with these dynamic shapes and intersecting paths. On the left are primarily cozy, private spaces, and the right side is more open/public. 

On the Monday of 3.14.2016 we had meetings planned at the Hill House with Terri and Jamilah. In our meeting with Terri, when we brought up the idea of an urban art park, she mentioned that the Hill House won a grant to commission an artist to create a piece for the Hill District that will be there for two years. This was great because it is possible for the Court of Ideas to house this art piece and it builds into the urban art park idea because one of the goals was to encourage people to participate in creating art as a community. Terri was very enthusiastic about our ideas as was Jamilah. Jamilah did make a point about our project and its permanence and how she defined “sustainability” and she contrasted what we did with Tiny Retail, which was a space that allowed locals to showcase and sell their products. Jamilah said that the Tiny Retail space was just a shack and while it may have done some good for the people participating, in the long run, it was just a temporary shack and did not have any remaining/lasting changes. She also mentioned that the restaurants that the Hill CDC are probably going to be bringing into the Hill would be the likes of Chipotle and this was very different from what many of us thought of originally since we thought that it would be local businesses. Jamilah was very vocal about doing something that would help the community and creating the Court of Ideas with the idea that it would last longer than a couple of months.

After these meetings, we went back to the drawing board and tried to see what activities were the most important. Going off of our research and the group brainstorming session as well as the meetings with Terri and Jamilah, we made a list of what we wanted the Court of Ideas to do/be. Then we decided upon the design principles that we wanted to frame the concepts of the Court of Ideas in and also our final deliverables. After that we began to work with top down views of the Court of Ideas to figure out how we want it to be laid out and then we turned those top down views into three quarter drawings. This was an exercise in exploring the space and how we can use it to lead people through it while including the activities and design principles that we have settled on.

We designed a simple brainstorming activity that helps people generate ideas within the constraints of our project. The activity consisted of cards each with words that we took from the Hill Districts “Master Plan”. These words were originally generated from another group brainstorming exercise where people from the community were asked how they would describe the ideal future of the area around the Court of Ideas. 

In the activity, each group would draw cards from the deck and write down ideas that came to mind. Later in the activity, we took all the ideas the entire group really liked and further refined those concepts. 

We also received the posters we hung up in the Grayson Center. These were ideas that kids generated from the prompt ““What would you want to see in the new Court of Ideas?”

After these community brainstorms, our group tried to distill down the common themes we saw in all of the ideas. We ultimately determined that Performance, Educational, Open Space, and Public Art were the main topics that we could conclude as “interest areas” for the Court of Ideas.

We took the ideas that led to these large categories and began to flesh them out further in our own group brainstorming session. We tried to do our best to expand upon the original ideas and combine them whenever possible. 

After our whiteboard session, we then attempted to synthesize all the ideas into individual concepts that we could illustrate and propose. We found that after doing this our illustrated concepts were missing some of the fun and “out there” ideas we had in our brainstorm. In addition, our illustrations themselves could have more life to them. 

Jess, Linny, and I happened upon this exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art, which had a bunch of photos of the old Court of Ideas that we’d never seen before!

The photos are part of an exhibit called HACLab Pittsburgh: Imagining the Modern. You can see that there was a ton of activity and diversity in the Court of Ideas. We also found that there was a collaboration between Troy West (architect) and Douglas Cooper, one of the architecture professors here at CMU! So it might be worth talking to him about the project.

Research We continued our research of the Court of Ideas.  We came across an initiative to revitalize the Court of Ideas from a few years ago, but it was unclear if their work was still in progress or if it had stopped:

We contacted the organizers, as well as the other contacts that we came across from the meetings in the week before.  

Brainstorm/Focus Group Planning After getting a better sense of the future of the hill district and details of the court of ideas, we began preparing for our first focus group meeting.  We called the library to reserve a room and forwarded the information to all of the contacts we have gathered so far.  

We created posters to place around the area in places like the Hill House, Carnegie  Library, and other public places.  These posters gave a brief history of the Court of Ideas and its potential future, and informed people of the brainstorming session we planned at the Library.  We also created special posters that asked “what would you like to see in the Court of Ideas?” and provided a space below for people draw, write, and add their suggestions. 

We then began preliminary planning of the focus group meeting by looking at different brainstorming methods  for groups. 

Meeting with Terri We met with Terri on Wednesday and spoke with her about our progress and plans.  She gave us some suggestions about what we could do at our focus group meeting, and helped us put our posters in the Hill House.   Terri us to Jamilah Lahijuddin, the head for the Youth organizers of the Hill District Consensus Group.  We talked to her about our focus group meeting, and she plans to bring some of the members of the Youth Organizers to our meeting.   Terri also mentioned the Grayson Center, a youth after school program for students from middle schoolers to high schoolers.  We went there after and spoke to the students about our project.  We left them one of the drawing posters for them to respond to.   We also left posters at the Carnegie Library in the Hill District. 

Exploring After some successful meetings/postering, we had some extra time, so we decided to explore the Hill district more to get a fell of the area.  We tried to find some parks, but weren’t able to find any public spaces.  However we did find this view:

Last week, we had three meetings:

Hill CDC

We met with Marlene Landrum, in order to get a better sense of the development going on around the space. We came into the meeting with a working knowledge of the Hill District Master Plan, but she introduced us to the Centre Ave. Corridor Redevelopment and Design Plan. Here are some highlights:

10 year plan to bring life back to Centre Ave

Restaurants along Wylie Ave.

Cultural and arts hub

Shops along Centre Ave

Empty lot next to New Granada will become a commercial and residential mixed-use building

Goal of creating a distinct hill district identity

Mary Monaghan

Mary is the Assistant Director for Neighborhood Libraries at the Carnegie Libraries. We’ve heard so many good things about the Carnegie Library at the Hill District, how they were able to get input from the community to create a very successful public space. We asked her about the process of creating the library and how we could get community involvement on our project. Some highlights:

History is a big deal to the community. The library has murals and images that reference important moments in the hill’s past.

Methods for Research: The library held regular, open meetings for anyone who was interested in getting involved

Awareness within the community: Posters, emails, announcements at community meetings were used to advertise the project.

A place to just “be”: They found that the hill didn’t have a place for people to just..hang out. The library creates a “living room” space where you don’t have to pay, buy anything, or do anything to be there.

Hill District Consensus Group

The HGCG is a sort of community town hall meeting, where organizations go to make announcements and get feedback. We went to their Feb 12 meeting - here’s the highlights:

Terri was there!

Community very passionate for change within their community. They want what’s best for them. Not afraid to say it how it is and demand what’s right.

pervasive gun and domestic violence culture

transportation deserts

gangs in schools (presented by youth organizers)

job development opportunities 

One member expressed their distaste for people who “come to these meetings, get what they need, and leave.” We’re definitely very self-conscious of our presence and intervention in this community, and we’re trying the best to not be just another one-off developer.

After the meeting, we spoke to organizers Carol Hardeman and Bonnie Laing to set up focus meetings regarding the Court of Ideas. They’re a great resource to connect us to the rest of the community and get our project out there.

We’re all feeling pretty excited about the project, especially since we’re finally getting a better picture of who to involve and how to get them involved. 

On February 1st, we shared our progress with the rest of the class. A few days earlier, we had sent emails out to the people form the contact list that Terri gave us and by the time Monday and Wednesday came around, some people had already reached back to us and meetings were made.

Meetings

Gina and I will be meeting with the Library assistant director at the Carnegie Library at 2 PM on February 12th. There is also going to be a meeting on the 12th (just to introduce ourselves and meet more people) with the consensus group that meets once a month on the second week.There will be a meeting with the Hill CDC (Hill Community Development Corporation) at 4pm on February 10th by their office next to the New Grenada Theatre. The Design Center has yet to respond to the email and an email will be resent and we will try to contact the center itself.

The “three stages” of our project.

Touch Base

On February 3rd, we did a touch base to see where we were at and what meetings we’ve made/how much progress we’ve seen so far. Then we proceeded to talk about the step by step process and the stages that we think we should be going through as well as creating a complimenting calendar so that we can all stay on task. Essentially, the research/gathering contacts portion would be the bulk of the remaining semester and a couple of weeks devoted to ideation, iterations, and collaborations and a few weeks to make the final deliverables. We also decided that we would try to have a meeting with Terri once every two weeks so that we can keep her in the loop of things as well as a way for us to keep on top of our schedule.

Make Tools

There was the Court of Ideas. Located behind the New Granada Theater in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this guerrilla-architecture project was the product Troy West+CMU and the Young Black Organizers in the 1960′s. 

It was a multi-use gathering space for anything from conversations to performances, and it served as a bridge between the racial divide between this community and the rest of the city.

Then and Now

Now the Court of Ideas is just another part of another vacant lot in the Hill District. Remnants of the concrete structure can still be found on site, but it’s barely recognizable and covered in trash.

Project Goals

Revitalizing the Space

Our ultimate goal is to bring this space back to life. This may involve recreating the original Court of Ideas concept, or creating a totally different type of space, depending on what the needs and desires of the community are. Seeing as we only have the next 5 months to work, the likelihood of seeing this actualized into a physical space is very low. But if we can create the beginnings of a plan that the community can get behind, I think that there will be potential to hand it off to another group within the community. 

Engaging the Community

Because we’re not integrated into the Hill District and we’re not familiar with the community there, our current plan is to communicate constantly with the local residents throughout the course of the project in order to get a feel for the history of the space and the needs of the people. We want to be extremely careful that this doesn’t become a ‘white-man’s-burden’ project, dropping in some unwanted, unnecessary, flashy design that no one uses. 

I think that our biggest challenge will be convincing the groups in the community to take us seriously. Because there are so many student projects and research studies taking place in the Hill District that seem to provide no real benefit to the community itself, there is no real reason for them to think any differently of us. 

Initial Brainstorming

We did a 15 minute brainstorming activity to get our ideas flowing and to gauge each other’s thoughts on potential directions this project could go. We initially aimed for a spectrum of realistic/unrealistic ideas to get a feel for the general scope of the project, in order to give us a jumping-off point for future conversations with others. We’re planning to repeat this exercise-- as well as other make tools-- with members of the community in order to gain more input into concept development.

Terri Baltimore

Sharing our brainstorming maps with Terri

We met up with Terri Baltimore from the Hill House Association, who is definitely proving to be our biggest ally in the creation of this project. Her knowledge of the ongoings in the Hill District is unlimited and she’s been nothing but enthusiastic. She gave us a lot of history surrounding the Court of Ideas, as well as a long list of contacts who have worked in that space over the years, including but not limited to Design Center PGH, Rand Corp, the Hill CDC, and the Hill House. 

We’re currently in the process of setting up meetings to gain more insight into the community and potentially set up focus groups for future make tool research and development. Once we have more contact we may be able to start having more in-depth conversations about the ways to make this project a reality.

Why?

“Why is this important? Why do you want to be here?”

Hearing this question was one of the most important moments from our conversation with Terri. Coming from an impoverished community that has been more or less ‘used’ by education and research institutes, Terri advised that there are people in the community who will be decidedly less welcoming to our arrival, and that this is a question that we needed to be prepared to answer. 

For myself, this is a chance to see the reality of service design, and it will be my first time working with real people outside my demographic on a project that could become real and have strong impact on the local residents. And while it could just be an urban design project creating some drafts of a park, it has the potential to be so much more personal because our audience is so specific. If we could successfully engage people in the creation of the park and get them actually excited about its development, then on some levels, I think I could say we succeeded.