On Family: Design Brigade Week 4
With our initial concepts green-lighted by our client, how do we close in on a design proposal and design language as a team?
Student Team: Ivy Li, Janelle Schmidt, Huy Truong, Vicky Wu, Sasha Zwiebel
A project co-sponsored by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media and Atelier Cho Thompson.
For Week 4, the On Family team got to work processing client feedback from the mid review as well as from the resident survey. With client approval on the presented ideas, our team sat down to discuss the proposals that we wanted to continue with — continually referencing our research to ground our ideas. Unanimously, our team decided to continue iterating on the Towers Trail. This proposal encompassed a range of our design interests and more importantly, seemed to correspond most with what the resident desired.
Resident Survey
Before commencing another round of design though, the priority at the beginning of this week was to process the collected survey results. Of roughly 300 residents, we received 57 responses. These responses came from a diverse group of residents within the Towers community, with some being long-time residents of the Towers and others having just recently moved in. Encouragingly, these survey responses corroborated many of our initial understandings about the kinds of interventions that the residents wanted. From this, we generated three critical design goals: 1) Campaign Against Boredom to combat the problem of boredom, 2) See Community as a Lifeline to address the issue of isolation, and 3) Create Confidence in Protocols to contend with the issue of fear surrounding the virus.
Clarifying Ideas
Continuing from there, our team began another round of ideation. Reflecting on our proposed design interventions and how we hoped to proceed, we developed a framework of two systems that distilled the main components of our design interests. These two systems include 1) a pod system and 2) a wayfinding system.
Pulled directly from the Towers Trail idea, the pod system encapsulates the placemaking pods component of the trail while the wayfinding system constitutes the connective tissue between these pods. Recalling the three scales of design that we had established for the mid review presentation — personal, furniture, and organizational — the pod system would primarily interact at the personal and furniture scale while the wayfinding system would mainly focus on organizational level interventions. Combined, these two systems also address the kit of parts and participatory elements that we had initially imagined. Additionally, when considering the who, what, when, and whys for each system, a pod and wayfinding system covered specific points that we had deemed necessary to incorporate in our designs. They address COVID-19 safety, physical wellness, and emotional wellness for the residents, staff, companions, and visitors at the Towers. Plus, these systems would allow for stages of implementation that could happen at the Towers administration’s discretion based on feasibility and funding.
Roadblocks
Nearing the end of the week, with even more sketches and ideas scattered across our collaborative online whiteboard, our team realized the next hurdle in our work. In addition to the piecemeal, multipronged proposal that we had settled on, the nature of teamwork meant multiple interpretations and styles of design. We had to reach a decision on what the design language would be for the On Family team moving forward. This entails settling on color palettes, material choices, and graphic styles, as well as figuring out specific programs and functions in the two systems. This step will be critical to our future developments and will set the tone for the final proposals. With the overarching goal of always basing our design decisions on client and resident feedback, we returned once again to our research. We drafted a few color palettes and compiled a few graphic styles we liked. We also selected out specific points of interest, including art, partitions, and pods — as well as versions of how they might manifest. At this stage, we are also considering fabrication possibilities. To that end, we will be looking to local New Haven fabricators and potentially combining bought and custom-made designs for a more cost-effective approach.
Next Steps
Heading into Week 5, we need to reconvene and review our various mood boards to settle on a cohesive and appropriate design language. We will continue researching and brainstorming pod and wayfinding system components with multifunctionality, furniture designs, organizational ability, materiality, and fabrication amongst other considerations in mind. To guide the next design iterations, we plan on returning to the Towers site to take note of specific spaces for our pod and wayfinding interventions. To that end, we may also source information from the residents themselves. This may lead to a second round of resident surveys or we may continue through in-person interviews. We will also have by the start of Week 5, a roadmap for the next few weeks for how the team will develop and roll out the final deliverables. Included in these deliverables now are additional COVID-19 guideline graphics for the Towers and a roadmap detailing the different phases of implementation for the Towers Trail.
