On Learning: Design Brigade Week 9
A project co-sponsored by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media and Atelier Cho Thompson. For more information, visit Design Brigade.
Design Updates
As we approach the end of this internship, we are making final touches on the guidebook. We’re super proud to have finished a draft of the guidebook that comes in at 130+ pages! After diving in deep and putting a lot of effort into detailing the content as well as the format, this week, we floated back up to the surface for a broader look at the guidebook to this point. We had many internal discussions to review how people would approach the guidebook on first glance, and to what level it conveys our intentions and ideas legibly and instructively. The first issue was the Title of the guidebook, which should capture concisely the entirety of the project and frames the rest of the reading. We brainstormed with our one of our mentors, Brittany Bland, who gave us the valuable advice to jot down the first words we would use to describe our major goals of the guidebook; what do we want to convey the most? Previously, the guidebook had the lengthy title of “A Guidebook for New Haven Cultural Institutions in the Era of COVID-19.” While descriptive, it is too verbose and unmemorable. As of now, we’ve decided on “Connect New Haven: Bridging Creativity and Community in the Era of COVID-19.” This new title derives from the guidebook’s ever expanding audience and touches on the central purpose of the guidebook: to bring creative activities directly to the community. “Bridging” and “Connection” in the context of On Learning become the hit words that get every one of us on board.
Besides the progress on deciding our title, another significant section of “How to Use This Guidebook” edited by Soomin was supplemented after “From Research to Design”. This new section explains the sequential framework of execution for each design model: Listen, Organize, Fabricate, Execute, and Follow-up. It also emphasizes that the actual implementation is super flexible and adaptable to any potential collaborators and practical conditions under this outline. Last but not least, all the steps encourage as much engagement with neighborhood members and local organizations as possible to maximize the connection building and its sustainability.
This week we sent out the latest version of our guidebook to the clients, community members and advisors for revision advice. Ming proofread the whole book, gave a thumbs up to creditable parts and pointed out where she was confused, pushing us to strengthen the overall legibility to better convey our ideas. Besides responding to Ming’s feedback, Soomin modified the format of the resource sheet, as Kayley and Robbie worked out the map formats.
NXTHVN Updates:
In our meeting with Jay, the director of the apprenticeship program at NXTHVN, and the seven apprentices, we learned more about the individual apprentices and their interests and strengths. They are a diverse group of artists; for example, Justin is a poet, performer, and a music maker, and Kaitlyn is a painter who has been working with one of the artist fellows at NXTHVN. We presented our guidebook, focusing on our models, and heard some of the apprentice’s initial impressions. One of them told us that they were interested in the mural model, which we are currently developing. Another apprentice showed interest in the Bike Outpost model and mentioned that it can be a part of a pop-up showcase of some sort. We also learned that the apprentices were comfortable leading students and families in an activity.
With this information, we are going to flesh out our collaboration with NXTHVN. One idea is to center the potential program around other efforts in the neighborhood such as the People’s Collaborative for Dixwell, Friends of the Goffe Street Armory, and Ice the Beef. We also started to explore how to spread the word to the Dixwell community; there are a lot of churches and schools near NXTHVN, which would be great for distributing fliers. We will focus on activities in which the apprentices are able to teach specific skills and guide students and families, but also to learn and exercise leadership skills and collaborate with one another.
Roadblocks and Breakthroughs
Throughout this project, we’ve gone back and forth internally about the guidebook’s audience. When we first started, we defined the guidebook as specifically for cultural institutions. We defined the term “cultural institutions” broadly, to encompass a wide range of New Haven institutions, but also specific enough to focus on arts and cultural organizations, as opposed to something like a sports team. Until this week, we had felt pretty confident that our target audience was right, but a meeting with Jay Kemp, the Apprenticeship Coordinator at NXTHVN, broadened our understanding of the guidebook’s audience. Jay, to our surprise, felt that maybe an organization such as Ice the Beef, who are specifically dedicated to ending youth gun violence, could use this guidebook. Jay said that the five steps under each model (listen, organize, fabricate, plan, and follow-up) could be potentially useful too for these youth organizers to creatively connect to other teens and community members. Jay’s interpretation of the guidebook really broadened our sense of who the book was for. Ice the Beef is a very different organization than the museums we originally designed this guidebook for, but Jay helped us see that they could potentially also find use for it in some fashion. As a result of this meeting, we’re revisiting the term “cultural institution” and questioning whether it appropriately sums up the target audience. For example, we’re considering switching “institution” to “organization” to broaden what kinds of groups could use the guidebook, and reconsidering whether the word “cultural” is at all appropriate to use. We acknowledge that we only have one week left in the Design Brigade to make a decision about this issue, but we’re certain that through rigorous debate we will reach the right conclusion.
Finally, we’ve had some difficulty this week nailing down what a community mural program (one of our XL models) would look like. Kayley has done some initial research on the topic, but has found it difficult to define a series of general steps like we have for the other models. When done with the community in mind and the intention of building connections, mural making can be a restorative and collective artistic practice. However, when done superficially it can end up serving the wrong people and end up being more about the final product than the process. Of all of our models, mural-making is perhaps the most likely to be viewed as a “band-aid” solution to much larger problems, and thus this section will require a bit more research on our end before we can put it into the guidebook.
Next Steps
Heading into the last week of the project, the team spent some time envisioning the future for the guidebook. We had some initial conversations about distribution methods and the continuation of this project, and we will implement these preliminary plans for the book with our mentors next week. We have also received plenty of suggestions from our community partners in the past few weeks, including having a virtual launch of the book for better outcome and reaching out to the public school board. As of now, our plan is to modify the virtual launch into an audio tour of the guidebook, but we will need to put more thoughts into the delivery methods and how can the audio tour be a constructive part of the project. Alison Arieff, the editorial director at SPUR, also suggested having a poster version of the book for marketing purposes (like some posters from CUP, the Center for Urban Pedagogy), and we will work on that in the coming weeks.
On the other hand, our team has started the revision process of the book. Aside from proof reading the contents and adjusting the organization of the chapters, we will focus more on making the graphic language more coherent. This includes updating the several existing maps in the guidebook, fine tuning the icons and visual language, etc. One of the most important tasks in this process will be revising our resource sheets at the end of each model. We intend the resource sheet to be two pages of condensed resources that the users can just print out and use at their convenience, and we will be working on restructuring the layout of these sheets to make them more accessible and precise.
Next week, we will also focus on incorporating some final comments from our clients and community partners into the guidebook. We will continue the conversation with NXTHVN and their apprentices, and hopefully we will gain more insights on what they are interested in participating in and how the current models can be modified. The team members were excited to learn that the high school apprentices were particularly interested in the Bike Outpost and the Mural models, yet it is a bit of a challenge to flesh out these models in a week. Our next steps are to connect with the New Haven public schools and see if we can narrow down the scope and make the Mural model more precise.
