d1/
Coordinated
Community
Greenspaces

DEC 2024
8 weeks
Urban Strategy, Experience Design

In collaboration with Enzo Mignano,
Matt Kish, and Odiso Obiora

Role: Research & Strategy, Storyboarding

A coordinated care strategy for maintaining urban greenspaces and activating local communities. Through a set of design interventions, including plant a maintenance dashboard (NEMO) and an integrated AR game experience (Leaf it to Me), we aim to turn urban landscape maintenance into a co-opted community experience.

The proposal is designed for Little Village, an up-and-coming arts neighborhood in East Detroit, and takes into consideration the unique social and environmental challenges faced in its development.

How can we grow an engaged Detroit community?

Similar to other neighborhoods in the area, Little Village faces the challenges of high vacancy and low density, and local developers Library Street Collective hope to reinvigorate the area as a center for the arts and creatives. Trough ethnographic and observational research of the neighborhood, we learned that a challenge facing development is the concern of bringing together existing communities and newcomers.

We saw an opportunity in the urban greenery of the neighborhood, where most vacant lots were overrun with invasive species due to years of non-maintenance and neglect. Greenspace maintenance is an expensive problem, and the lack thereof has helped to fuel the narrative of vacancy and unwelcome in the area. Using this as an entry point, our team reinvisioned greenspace maintenance as a collaborative activity that can engage visitors and residents of the area. Through our design interventions, we hope to create a shared stake in tending the public spaces that they share.

1. Plant Sensors

The first part of the strategy is to understand plant behavior through networked real-time data. We shared conversations with local innovators who are working on developing affordable plant sensors to understand the current capabilities of this technology, and we prototyped our own working model with arduino.

2. Maintenance Dashboard

The data collected from the sensors are transferred and organized in the dashboard NEMO (Natural Environment Management & Operations). This dashboard keeps tabs on the health of individual plants and the composite ecosystem, and it uses this information to propose gardening and maintenance tasks.

From our conversations with those in the landscaping and arborist industries, we learned that they spend most of their time assessing, rather than conducting actual maintenance. With the dashboard, we hope to streamline this process and introduce tech-related skills to the field.

3. On-site Signage

On the public end, the information from NEMO is then conveyed back into the physical space through a set of on-location signage. Aimed towards educating and engaging visitors of the area, the signs contain a mix of real-time data and educational information to create a diverse learning experience.

4. AR Game Experience

The signs then direct visitors to Leaf it to Me, an AR game experience that allows them to get hands-on and participate in active landscape maintenance.

Starting with beginner gardening tasks, the game teaches urban residents basic skills in gardening and reduces the barrier of entry to maintaining greenspaces. Through a system of level-ups and reward collaborations with local businesses, we encourage visitors and residents alike to gain an active stake in the wellbeing of Little Village-- as well as introduce them to the plants and people around them.

Impacts & Possibilities

The current model is designed to be implemented to greenspaces at the museum and waterfront (currently under development) developed by Library Street Collective.

Looking at the long-term implicaitons and future applications of this strategy, we see a great potential in building climate resilience, optimizing the field of landscape maintenance, and advocating for collective land use.

Audrey Tang

Design

Research

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