On Family: Design Brigade Week 10
With the week ending in our final presentation, how can we efficiently represent all of the project comments we hold dear?
Student Team: Janelle Schmidt, Huy Truong, Ivy Li, Vicky Wu, Yushan Jiang, Alex Mingda Zhang
A project co-sponsored by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media and Atelier Cho Thompson.
This week was capped by our final client presentation where we explained our final deliverables and the reason for their phasing. The plan was for us to have the audience of The Towers CEO, Gus Keach-Longo, two of our New Haven mentors, Eric Epstein and Peter Newman, and The Towers staff including Jesse Wescott, Rebecca Goodman Olshanksi and Dawn Staton. However, with vacations and the very real hurricane that had just hit New Haven, quite a few members were out of office. Jesse Wescott and Peter Newman were our receivers of this presentation, and they provided so many thoughtful comments and encouragement!
We presented the project in two phases, phased by budget and priority.
The biggest and newest part of the proposal was the signage for what we’re now (post-review) calling the Narrative Trail (Towers Trail + Historical Narrative). The graphics still need an iteration or two, but the goal of the trail signage is that informative graphics and text will be dotted along the walking path.
A surprising outcome of the presentation was the enthusiasm expressed for the autobiographical audio narrative. We pushed the implementation of the audio narrative to Phase 2 because of the feedback that we had gotten from a week prior that basically expressed worry from The Towers team that there wasn’t enough support to facilitate this idea. The Towers’ main sentiment was that if this was going to be done, it would have to be done right. We learned that The Towers’ institution has an archive of video footage of resident interviews from years prior, and Gus expressed that that should really be included in this initiative. We totally agreed, and that discussion illuminated a reason behind the staff’s anxieties: there’s not really an outside member that could process the footage for us. A staff member would at least have to find where the videos were located and possibly chaperone any intake that our team would do in case the footage was fragile. Finally, when we expressed this in the presentation, Peter and Jesse wholly pushed back. Peter was adamant that the audio narrative was the heart and soul of our proposal, that it could change lives, and that it could also be a very effective resident recruiting tool for The Towers. He offered his support in any way we could use it, and that made us feel great. We are currently examining the idea of partnering with Yale’s Dwight Hall to see this project through.
Additionally, in Phase 1, we proposed the facilitation of Resident Reflection Cards. We saw the cards as a compromise between the audio autobiographical narrative and nothing.
Finally, Phase 1 proposed our COVID Posters and stickers. The list includes stickers for high touch surfaces, “wear a mask” sticker reminders, bench markings for social distance, and an occupancy poster for the courtyard.
The presentation created a lot of excitement and encouragement within our team! Jesse and Peter are such positive forces, and their feedback was the boost we needed to propel us into Week 11 and crank out the final materials.
