d4/
Street Planters
for Downtown
MAY 2023
6 weeks
Urban Strategy, Data Modeling,
Interface Design
In collaboration with Devin Vowels
Role: Data Schematic Design, Concept Planning, Interface Design
A web prototype that brings community interactions to the forefront of local design decisions. With STREET PLANTERS FOR DOWNTOWN, businesses, residents, and city government can create a street planter installation informed by the needs of local stakeholders, ecological context, and traffic flow data.
We take for granted a lot of the materials, environments, and interactions we have within an urban space. To bridge this gap, this web prototype uses the humble street planter as a tool to encourage more interactions among community members.
How can we build community interactions on the street level?
During the recovery of the pandemic, outdoor spaces gained new appreciation and social emphasis. As a way to carve out spaces on the street-- for play, business, or leisure-- cones, fences, and other variety of makeshift furniture was used. Among them, we recognized one type of furniture in particular of great potential: the street planter.
When we interact with street planters, we become aware of the space and the
environment we exist in. To reimagine how our community functions—one with
enriched interactions—we want to equalize the platform of different actors within an
urban space. This isn’t limited just to the human actors, but also the space’s ecological and economic actors as well.
To make something for the community by the community, we start with recognizing
the other actors that share our space. From this recognition, we hope to encourage a more vivid and diverse lifestyle.
Approach
The schema above displays the variables (human, ecological, and built) used to calculate and analyze the suitability of the planter design.
Each decision made regarding the planter’s design will be scored according to the sorted list of prioirities (see below), and the project owner will be able to assess the impacts of their design with regards to the space the project occupies.
Strategy
Each step of the prototype mirrors the three aspects of community—stakeholder negotiation, localized economy & ecology, and street-level events—and examines the role of the street planter in different spatial and contextual scales.
The goal of the tool is for its user to know their neighbors, the sources of their productions, and their natural environment a little bit better with each step of the interface.