community design - school workshops

Today we held a school workshop with a mix of area 4th and 5th graders who are attending summer school at PS 52, Sheepshead Bay Elementary. A mix of area school teachers and volunteer parent teacher assistants were also on hand to help with the workshop and give their input.

First, we gave the students a beach ecology lesson and tried to have them make the connection between the lesson and Plumb Beach, which starts on the eastern border of our park site. Jon, who is heading up the ecological restoration independent study for Plumb Beach, led the lesson, showing the class an actual horseshoe crab shell, sea lettuce algae and shells of clams and oysters. Then he asked them to draw a day at the beach. What we hoped to learn from their drawings is what they value at the beach. We also wanted to see if we could incorporate their images into a customized fence for the park site. Above is a great image of the plentiful sea lettuce that lives in Sheepshead Bay and our larger bay system, Jamaica Bay.

In our second activity, we talked to students about landscape architecture and what to think about when designing a park. We talked about determining program, the size of each program and to think practically about where to place each program. We also talked about considering the different users of the park. Next I showed them four boards full of images of creative precedents to get them to think outside of the box of the typical playground parks that they are used to. Lastly we used the guidelines and the precedents we just learned about to draw our park design on a bird's eye view photograph of the site. Then the youth broke up into groups of three to work on their own design. At the very end, each group presented their work.

As the two images above show, the youth showed a wealth of ideas, yet, the warped sense of space of the bird's eye view photograph made the exercise tricky in its usefulness. The group that designed the park above were very sophisticated in their sense of space, and actually tipped me off to the challenge of using a perspectival image as a base for designing. They used the perspectival image, but also supplemented it with a plan view, which they called their detail plan. So cool!

Luckily we had another activity to replace the design-a-park activity. For the next two sessions we learned about budgeting and prioritizing program with the Brigham Bux activity.

Again we talked about precedents and program and users to set up our brainstorming of what the youth thought should be in the park. After we brainstormed, we voted on the top five. We then labeled buckets with the top five picks. We gave the youth a set amount of Brigham Bux and asked them to pretend they were in charge of the budget and to spend their money based on what they wanted most. We counted the votes and then ordered the buckets from most wanted to least. The last class was really cute and clapped after the summation was announced for each bucket. They were ultimately happy to see that the pool was the most wanted park feature. At the end I did a quick summary, explaining how I would think about the input and prioritizing they just gave me.

It was a great day. It was fun and very helpful. We learned that the youth really want a pool, creative play area (like rock climbing and rubber surfaces to bounce on), food stand and benches.

Below is my temporary id that I have to get every day to enter the building where I work. It's a waste of sticker paper, but it's also an interesting marker of my daily moods. Today I look like a happy busy bee. Another fun and successful community workshop!