On Family: Design Brigade Week 7
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.
After last week’s client meeting with Jesse, Dawn, and Gus from the Towers, we reconfigured our project into two sub-projects. Of these two sub-projects, one is focused on producing a printed guidelines packet containing guidebooks and stickers for residents and administrators. The other sub-project continues the On Family Team’s work on developing the Towers Trail in the Towers campus. Specifically, we’re looking into outdoor storytelling elements and finalizing the aesthetics of the wayfinding system.
Guidelines Packet
In order to protect and keep all residents and administrators in the Towers updated with COVID-19 information, the On Family team decided to create a booklet with actionable steps to avoid the virus spread. Recalling parts of our first proposal, this booklet would help us reach our goal of creating confidence in COVID-19 protocols. In doing so, we hope to appropriately empower residents and to lessen anxieties they may have about the virus.
While developing the guidelines booklet, we want to provide content specific to the Towers demographic. That means making sure the graphics are clear and intelligible and that the content will be directly applicable to residents. We will be relying heavily on axonometric diagrams with notes to illustrate common situations in the buildings and how to best stay safe in each of the situations. We will primarily source our research from medical authorities including WHO and CDC to keep the information accurate.
In addition to the booklet, we were also thinking of creating a set of reminder stickers that come with the guidelines packet. These stickers would be for use in the Towers. In addition to the existing signs with content like “Wear a mask” and “Remember to socially distance,” we will also create more environmentally specific stickers — like a sticker on elevator buttons indicating a high touch surface or a sticker on existing benches to help visualize the required six feet distancing space. We hope to coordinate with the Towers to implement these temporary, but durable, stickers in and around the Towers buildings to help residents feel more confident in and aware of their activities throughout the campus.
Trail
After our client meeting with the Towers staff, the On Family team met to discuss how the Towers Trail would move forward. We thoroughly discussed the aesthetics of and the function of the proposed trail and decided to incorporate a new, narrative element into the trail. In addition to being an exercise loop, we hope to enrich the experience of walking along the trail by adding in historical and personal storytelling in deliberate places along the trail.
Initially, this idea to add a narrative component to the trail came out of our broad research into the Towers' history. As we looked into the Towers’ past, we were struck by the rich histories of the Towers residents. We felt that there was an emotional depth to this community that we hadn’t engaged within our design. We wanted to provide a way for these residents to tell their stories and also a way for both residents and their loved ones to engage with these stories. After briefly discussing this with Gus from the Towers, we also looked into including the urban history of the surrounding neighborhood into this narrative trail. As this space used to be the trolley depot, we are in the process of researching New Haven’s urban and trolley history. Plus, with the Towers location near many of New Haven’s infamous urban renewal projects, we are looking into how we might weave these various narrative threads together.
For this week, our main goal was to figure out how to coordinate storytelling and wayfinding signage. We planned to provide a walking or exercise experience along the trail but we are now also grappling with how to incorporate narrative elements without cluttering the scene with too many signs. As a potential solution to this signage issue, we are proposing audio elements as portals to these stories along the trails. In this design, people would be able to access the audio content by scanning a QR code. The QR code would lead to a website that would serve as the archive and host for all narrative content. We imagine this website will be a place to store not just the trail content, but also a more personal resident narrative that we will focus on developing next week.
Roadblocks
In developing our design and pushing it to its next iteration, we’ve also stumbled across a handful of roadblocks. For one, we’ve learned from a site visit this week that visitors are now required to have a negative COVID-19 test (no older than 10 days) to be granted access into the building. With a limited portion of our team in New Haven and with the time delay on receiving with COVID-19 testing results, we will not have access to the Towers for the time being. We’ve also had to devote time to updating and revising our proposals to match the Towers branding, which was recently established and implemented on the campus. As for the narrative elements, without access to the Towers archives, we might be stagnating on the Towers research. We also have to figure out the logistics of storytelling — whose story gets told, what stories and why; how to show and tell stories equitably (including considerations for people who may have visual and hearing impairment); the logistics of recording, uploading, and maintaining this audio-narrative project beyond the Design Brigade; and getting access to archives and gathering audio remotely in the age of COVID-19.
Next Steps
- Pitching the narrative recording ideas to Dawn at the Towers in Week 8.
- Schedule a meeting with Matt Nemerson from the New Haven Shore Line Trolley Museum to further research the trolley and urban history narrative components.
- Schedule a meeting with fabricators to begin working on pre-implementation content.
- Set up a proposed budget for the fabrication of the project.
