DESIGN FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Let's start off by saying, at the beginning of the semester upon receiving the syllabus I was't sure that this class was going to be something that interested me at all, but I was completely wrong. The first day of class we all had to introduce ourselves, tell everyone what our major was, and what year we were. Little did I know I was going to be in a class full of architecture and design students, most of them being juniors and seniors. Me being a first year nursing student, I stuck out a bit. This is when I started to panic. I knew nothing about design or the design world for that matter, so I instantly thought I was going to fail, but I decided to stick with it and give it a chance. This ended up being a great decision!
We started out learning about creative placemaking, design-thinking processes, and community development. As assignments, we read many journal articles and essays that key leaders in the design world wrote. We were then asked to reflect on what we read by writing our own journals. This was my favorite part because I got the chance to voice my opinion from a non-designer stand point. It was also to our benefit that our professor set up times for a few of these key leaders to come in and talk to us about many of the topics we were learning about. After reading, researching, and discussing how design and community development go hand and hand we were then posed a challenge.
This whole course was based around actively applying the concepts we learned in class to an out-of-the-classroom service project in Covington, Kentucky. Throughout the entire project we worked in close partnership with the Center for Great Neighborhoods of Covington. CGN is an organization that brings people and resources together to strengthen neighborhoods, resolve issues, and shape the future of the community. In small groups, we started exploring the town of Covington and the pros and cons of its community. We took pictures, talked to community members, and sat in on some community meetings. Why were we doing all of this? The main objective of this course was to come up with an idea for a "final project" to better the neighborhood of Covington and strengthen its community through design. The project that I chose to be a part of was focused on eliminating the physical and psychological divide that a highway had put in their community. Many complained that it separated the neighborhood too much and the two sides didn't even speak to each other anymore. Others mentioned that it was dangerous to cross, so they just stopped crossing it. The comments and complaints from community members were there in large numbers. So we were asked to design something that could diminish the negativity of the highway and get the community to come together again as one again.
Our group kicked off our project by going out into the Covington community and listening to what people had to say about the highway and its effect that its had on the community. After compiling the many thoughts and ideas from community members we then began to make a huge list of possible solutions, whether they were crazy or not, we wrote them down. Our professor then introduced us to a bucketing technique where we sorted out all of ideas into categories to get our thoughts straight. This entire process was a great learning experience for me because I had never been through the design process before and never knew it included so many detail oriented steps. The hardest part was trying to narrow down our ideas to three possible solutions for the community that the highway posed. This is where team building skills, listening, and compromising became a huge factor. After much debate, we finally reached three very good possible solutions and we were asked to prototype them. During prototyping, we were looking to see what ideas failed and what ideas to seemed to work in a real life circumstance. Prototyping was very hard. It was difficult to come up with a makeshift idea that could still give us an accurate representation of how our ideas would work. We eventually figured it out and made many observations while watching our prototype in action. It was the time to decide on a solution and go with it. I never thought a decision could be so hard, but the thought of failure was definitely a thought in our all of heads. Our professor constantly reassured us that many projects fail in the design world and we just have to keep going and fix their flaws. As a group, we decided to make a multi-panel community board on both sides of the highway that served as a communication hub known as the Covington Connection.
Our attached final presentation goes through all of the steps we took till we reached our final project and the many ideas implemented into our self-designed communication board.
We started out learning about creative placemaking, design-thinking processes, and community development. As assignments, we read many journal articles and essays that key leaders in the design world wrote. We were then asked to reflect on what we read by writing our own journals. This was my favorite part because I got the chance to voice my opinion from a non-designer stand point. It was also to our benefit that our professor set up times for a few of these key leaders to come in and talk to us about many of the topics we were learning about. After reading, researching, and discussing how design and community development go hand and hand we were then posed a challenge.
This whole course was based around actively applying the concepts we learned in class to an out-of-the-classroom service project in Covington, Kentucky. Throughout the entire project we worked in close partnership with the Center for Great Neighborhoods of Covington. CGN is an organization that brings people and resources together to strengthen neighborhoods, resolve issues, and shape the future of the community. In small groups, we started exploring the town of Covington and the pros and cons of its community. We took pictures, talked to community members, and sat in on some community meetings. Why were we doing all of this? The main objective of this course was to come up with an idea for a "final project" to better the neighborhood of Covington and strengthen its community through design. The project that I chose to be a part of was focused on eliminating the physical and psychological divide that a highway had put in their community. Many complained that it separated the neighborhood too much and the two sides didn't even speak to each other anymore. Others mentioned that it was dangerous to cross, so they just stopped crossing it. The comments and complaints from community members were there in large numbers. So we were asked to design something that could diminish the negativity of the highway and get the community to come together again as one again.
Our group kicked off our project by going out into the Covington community and listening to what people had to say about the highway and its effect that its had on the community. After compiling the many thoughts and ideas from community members we then began to make a huge list of possible solutions, whether they were crazy or not, we wrote them down. Our professor then introduced us to a bucketing technique where we sorted out all of ideas into categories to get our thoughts straight. This entire process was a great learning experience for me because I had never been through the design process before and never knew it included so many detail oriented steps. The hardest part was trying to narrow down our ideas to three possible solutions for the community that the highway posed. This is where team building skills, listening, and compromising became a huge factor. After much debate, we finally reached three very good possible solutions and we were asked to prototype them. During prototyping, we were looking to see what ideas failed and what ideas to seemed to work in a real life circumstance. Prototyping was very hard. It was difficult to come up with a makeshift idea that could still give us an accurate representation of how our ideas would work. We eventually figured it out and made many observations while watching our prototype in action. It was the time to decide on a solution and go with it. I never thought a decision could be so hard, but the thought of failure was definitely a thought in our all of heads. Our professor constantly reassured us that many projects fail in the design world and we just have to keep going and fix their flaws. As a group, we decided to make a multi-panel community board on both sides of the highway that served as a communication hub known as the Covington Connection.
Our attached final presentation goes through all of the steps we took till we reached our final project and the many ideas implemented into our self-designed communication board.
final_presentation_comm_design.pdf | |
File Size: | 3647 kb |
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Looking back on the course, I took so much more away from it than I ever thought possible. Although this course wasn't geared toward the medical field, it taught me so much about community building, how people in a community interact, their strengths and weaknesses, and how small problems can easily effect the overall well-being of the neighborhood. Throughout the course, I was constantly asking myself how could I apply the knowledge I learned into my life when I was done. I began to realize that I could take the concepts we learned and apply them to my community, and it definitely made me begin to look at my community in a new light. I started to analyze the problems of my neighborhood and the possible ways they could be fixed. I believe that the knowledge I learned will help me to become a more active community member in the future and inspired me to actually engage in the events of my community and voice my opinion about its strengths and weaknesses. Design for Community Development also taught me that failure is an option in life. Not necessarily to be content with failure, but that if ideas fail, then you have to try and try again. Foremost, a huge lesson I took away from taking this course is that even if something doesn't spark your interest at first or you don't think it could benefit you...think again, you could potentially learn way more than you ever thought possible.