On Family: Design Brigade Week 8
How might our project evolve with physical constraints while also expanding into digital space?
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.
Moving into Week 8, the On Family team was looking forward to meetings with fabricators, representatives from the Towers, and specialists who could help us flesh out our narrative trail. However, as the week progressed, our team was only able to be on call with a few local fabricators. These meetings turned out to be critical and well-timed. As Design Brigade enters its final few weeks, our team will need to focus our project scope with realistic expectations for fabrication and implementation. Throughout Week 8, we grappled with the trade-offs between working quickly towards an implementable proposal versus refining all of our ideal concepts.
Recognizing our current position in the timeline of the Design Brigade project, the On Family team worked to push our proposals into a pre-implementation stage. In the pre-implementation stage, our team looked into the specific costs and logistics of realizing our designs. After our meeting with the local design and fabrication company, Hugo & Hoby, we had a much better understanding of the labor associated with our ideas. This meeting provided a much needed realism to our ever-growing project scope. Since then, we’ve met as a team to update our goals for this project. Minimally, we will be producing graphics for COVID-19 guidelines. This includes the COVID-19 booklet, protocol reminder stickers for walls, windows, and specific indoor spaces. Additionally, it also includes social distancing marking throughout the Towers campus.
For the trail, we will be proposing four to five signs in varying sizes to display the historical narrative content. The trail will also involve distance markers along with COVID-19 distancing dots for gathering and resting spots. We hope to get approval from the Towers to publish a functional website for hosting narrative content. In terms of gathering narrative content, if given the green light, we would establish a system for residents, staff, or volunteers to record and upload content. We also hope to co-opt existing partition boards as community boards — creating a framework for programming to reinvigorate resident connections and daily life at the Towers.
On top of these deliverables, we are reconsidering the various ideas and proposals that have gotten lost or forgotten over the past few weeks. In particular, as our focus has shifted away from an activity-based trail with various pod locations, the concepts for the pods have been momentarily left behind. Connected to the pods are the various shade structures that we had imagined for the pods and other nooks on the Towers campus. For the final package that we deliver to the Towers, it would be a shame to omit these initial ideas. We are thinking of including suggestions for shading, with both a prefabricated option and a custom design option. We also want to include individual pod ideas with where they might be located, as well as a phasing timeline for how they might be implemented. Not forgetting the mural, we still hope to propose a beautiful mural for the Towers campus — potentially connecting with the Towers’ community arts coordinator Catherine Weiss to collaborate on the mural design.
Alongside drafting fabrication drawings, developing the narrative website, working on the wayfinding language and signage, and iterating on COVID-19 signage and stickers, we’ve also continued making progress on our COVID-19 guidelines book. The first draft is on schedule to be done in Week 9. Moving forward, we will review the book contents and begin doing test prints for the booklet. We will develop a few options for the logistical plan for passing off the website and narrative archive to the Towers when Design Brigade draws to a close. Additionally, for Week 9 we have reached out to Elihu Rubin from the Yale School of Architecture and Peter Crumlish from Dwight Hall at Yale to bring us further along with our urban narrative research. We’ve also scheduled a meeting with staff at the Towers to discuss the administrative components of the narrative recording project. We hope to contact more fabricators to compare quotes on our designs, and we’re looking to begin discussions on realizing the mural project. Lastly, at Week 9, we hope to present an updated record of our ideas to senior administrators at the Towers for review before our final week.
