On Family: Design Brigade Week 9

As we near the end of Design Brigade, how can we review and edit our designs to reach our initial goals of campaigning against boredom and safely reinvigorating Towers community engagement?

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.

In this penultimate week of Design Brigade, the On Family team had several external meetings. These meetings included discussions with our clients from the Towers (Becky, Dawn and Gus), critics from Yale (Peter from Dwight Hall, Elihu from Yale School of Architecture), and architects from local New Haven design firms (Peter from Newman Architects, Eric Epstein from Epstein Design). They brought practical and professional insight to our project and gave us useful suggestions for further developing our historical research and narrative design. Along with the meetings, we continued working on our deliverables: the audio-narrative website, guidelines book, COVID-19 stickers and posters, as well as budget estimations. This week we also had a “final” design review, though our work will continue through Week 10 and Week 11. For Week 9, our goal was to review our work with our clients and advisors in order to allow an extra week for implementation and modification after our design review.

Our main focus this week was on narrative design. Still struggling with the scope of the narrative elements, we went back and forth on our ideas—trying to figure out the best way to present our historical and autobiographical narrative proposal. As we worked on resolving lingering uncertainties, it helped us to recenter our approach on the goals we had initially set for this project.

With regard to the historical narrative, we had settled on two potential methods for us to develop our design : 1) an audio-record facilitated by our team, staff at the Towers, and advisors or volunteers from New Haven museums, and 2) a diagrammatic approach with specific, prompting questions to invoke a kind of multi-sensory experience. In addition, we also were also uncertain about what to center the historical narrative around. One option was to make the narrative trail about the history of New Haven and the other option was to be about the Towers’ own history. After the design review on Friday, the On Family team decided to delineate our historical narrative through diagrammatic drawings and focus our research efforts on Towers history rather than broader New Haven history. Drawing upon Rubin’s advice on the historical narrative, we reshaped our research and selected four topics: Towers Site Origins, Towers Beginnings, Tower East: The Introduction of Assisted Living to New Haven, and The Towers Today: The New Context of Urban Reconnection. In Week 9 our team was still waiting to review archival information, but we haven’t yet figured out an arrangement for entering the Towers. Nevertheless, we continued researching to our best capacity. In our research process and our final narrative trail content, we don’t aim to repeat history textbooks. Instead, we’re hoping to showcase unique and interesting elements of these different eras in the Towers history in order to help fight against boredom and stimulate resident engagement at the Towers.

As for the personal resident narratives, after discussion with staff at the Towers, we decided to center this component of the project in the courtyard. Situated inside the Towers campus (and with a new gazebo incoming), the courtyard will be a great place to safely conduct interviews and an excellent place to mount a sign for this project. To our delight, in a meeting with Dawn and Gus from the Towers, there is a history of interviewing and sharing resident stories at the Towers. Originally conducted in the beginning days of the Towers, we are ecstatic to help continue this legacy. The logistics still remain uncertain, though. With higher staff demands created by the coronavirus, the Towers staff will likely not be able to help us with interviews and documentation. To that end, we’re looking to propose a volunteer program or a potential partnership with a Yale department to record the residents’ stories.

On top of narrative design, we’ve continued developing the website, stickers and guideline book. For now, the website will remain in the in-between phase: drafted in Squarespace but pending decisions and greenlights. As for the COVID-19 stickers, we’ve sent them to various printing companies for quotes. Our test print of the guideline book went well and we’re prepping for its final production.

Looking forward to Week 10, we are planning to wrap up our ideas and begin working on a Design Brigade project documentation booklet. Our next steps include:

• Organize the small projects into the Phasing Outline
• Update our diagrammatic drawings
• Develop the guidebook with a clear introduction and table of contents
• Finish the documentation of Phase 1 components
• Further exploration into the partition and story stickers design
• Continue research on the history of the Towers
• Create mock ups of the diagrammatic drawings on the trail signs
• Prepare for and schedule a final, final review

Bittersweet as the end might be, the On Family team remains excited about the work that we have done and how it might soon be actualized.