On Memory: Design Brigade Week 2.
Defining “Memorial” and What It Means for the City of New Haven.
A question that has guided our design and research process is ‘how do we define a memorial, especially one that is at a cross-section of ongoing issues?’ One of our mentors told us this week to embrace the approach of “curating, not designing.” Rather than designing exactly what this memorial will be, we can create a framework for engagement that can change as the situation unfolds and the needs and experiences of the community develop.
Conceptual References
We began Week 2 by gathering inspirational projects, concepts, and precedents [see here]. We broke precedents down into three genres of memorials: digital, physical and hybrid. This let us examine the different ways in which ‘memorial’ has been approached by other artists and communities, allowing us to learn from what exists, emulate processes and delve into the features that have made each project successful.
A few examples:
- What is missing? By Maya Lin — Showcases an anti-memorial, a memorial about endangered species and extinction that attempts to protect the vulnerable species of this planet. The success of this ongoing digital memorial project is to inform and protect our planet so that future generations no longer need to use this memorial.
- Botanical Garden of Healing, New Haven CT — Pioneered by local mothers who had lost their children to gun violence, this project inspired us in its scope and meaning. On Wednesday, Marissa Mead (Svigals + Partners) gave a presentation on the projects trajectory, from conception to implementation. Her talk helped us understand how to approach the design of memorial as well as a community that is still hurting and healing with sensitivity.
Preliminary Designs
Although we’re still determining what the content, message, and breadth of our project will be (as driven by direct community input), we started to freely generate ideas and explore creative approaches to our design problem. This way, we hope to assess next steps and potential challenges in parallel to community outreach and engagement.
The memorial to be centered around social justice for black and brown communities, who were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic (see the statistics in the next section). Our preliminary sketches engage a critical lens as to why this is the case.
Below are some ideas we had, centered around three symbols we think represent this moment —
1. Face Masks: Healthcare professionals have long used masks as a means of personal protection, but coronavirus social distancing guidelines made masks iconic of the 2020 layman. As nationwide protests continue well into their second week, masks have also become a place for slogans, and a way of ensuring anonymity on the frontlines. To this end, masks are a shield, representing protection, safety and shelter, but are also a jarring image of this 2020 moment.
2. Breath: Breathing represents both death and life. The idea of breath is laden with a meaning that transcends this current moment, it is a key component of the violence of police brutality, and is one of the direct ways in which COVID-19 takes people’s lives. “I can’t breathe” has become an icon of this moment, one that is written on posters, walls, face masks and skin across the world.
3. An evolving physical structure: Similar to the way scaffolding changes as its architecture nears completion, the idea of a moving memorial, or an evolving structure represents growth; serving as a framework for community mobilization and as a platform for future development.
Other pressing thoughts include:
- Whose stories do we want to share and how will we do that? (Visuals? Audios? Testimonials? Histories?)
- What does __[Justice / Protest / Coronavirus / Community]___ sound or look like in New Haven?
Community Research: COVID-19 Data
Alongside our creative process, we started community outreach, which takes many forms. First, we needed to discern who in the affected New Haven communities were essential to include in our project for feedback and input. We met with an epidemiologist from the Connecticut Department of Public Health, who directed us to demographic data. This allowed us to statistically understand how and where New Haven has been impacted by COVID-19, the basis of this project.
According to the CT Dept. of Public Health, as of June 12, 2020:
- The City of New Haven has 2,639 confirmed and possible cases of COVID-19, 29% of the impacted individuals are African American.
- 100 of the total cases for the City resulted in death, 45% of those who died of COVID-19 are African American.
- Fair Haven and The Hill are neighborhoods who have felt the brunt of the virus.
Community Research: Advice and Outreach
In addition to stats and data, the design of the memorial will be driven by community input — a culmination of various ideas, stories, and voices of the affected New Haven communities and individuals. However, we face a significant challenge in fostering trust and partnership with the community because of remote and digital limitations. And so, in lieu of conducting in-person interviews and forums, we started to think of ways to develop sensitive and respectful methods of gathering substantial community engagement remotely.
We began with a focus on how to generate and distribute online surveys; receiving guidance from Kyle Pederson, director of the Connecticut Mental Health Center Foundation as well as from Marissa Mead, an architect from Svigals + Partners who was on the team that designed the Botanical Garden of Healing in New Haven. Questions were formulated to allow community members to share their feelings, thoughts, and visions for a potential memorial, which included open-ended queries like “How do you want this memorial to make you feel?” The answers to these questions will shape our definition and design of the memorial.
We had a meeting with Jeffrey Mansfield from MASS Design Group, an architecture firm that has experience with social justice architecture and memorials. He stressed MASS’s approach to design, which is based on a full-partnership with the community or affected individuals being served a project. In the case of sensitive topics such as loss and inequality, this means listening fully, sitting in discomfort, and not expecting trust immediately. Being open, empathetic, and patient were stressed as essential values for our project given the digital limits and time constraints. In reviewing the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, Mansfield discussed their approach to “spatialize trauma” whether digitally or physically. This approach to design allows a memorial to give a voice to the grieving, pain, and history felt and experienced by a people and provide space for reflection, education, and transformation.
We have a list of community leaders and organizations to reach out to for interviews, partnerships, advice, and feedback in Week 3. In these meetings, we are eager to hear about personal experiences and start building a network of people invested in shaping this project.
Roadblocks and How We’ve Overcome them
Acknowledging our capabilities and our limitations
We have learned this week that extensive research will be essential in the creation of an effective design. Our process cannot be only research or only design. And so, in the coming weeks, we will be designing and researching in parallel, using design to process and synthesize information and research to continuously inform our designs.
As noted earlier, there are limitations in our outreach effort due to the short project timeframe and the coronavirus pandemic, including social distancing, remote work, and affected populations. The tenuous relationship between Yale and the greater New Haven community may be an additional barrier to outreach and trust. For those who we can get in contact with, we plan to foster partnership and trust by engaging with sensitivity, empathy. We want to listen and learn.
Another challenge is our task to memorialize a moment that is not over. The COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing and systemic racial injustices continue. How do we memorialize moments that continue to affect people every day and that have no end in sight?
Given the complicated challenges that this project poses, our driving goal is to leverage our platform and capabilities to give voice to the truth. This will require us to be comfortable with discomfort and retain flexibility in our process to best serve this goal.
Next Steps
- Continue Research: We have a series of interviews for Week 3 with artists and architects who can advise us on the creative development of the project, and with local leaders who can inform our community outreach.
- Internal Website: progress for our work, to be continued and referenced after our project timeframe.
- Design Process: developing visuals in tandem with our research.
Additional Resources
‘No Haven: From Civil Rights to Black Power in New Haven’ by Yohuru Williams. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41069815?seq=1
‘The role of architecture in fighting a pandemic’ by Michael Murphy, Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/06/opinion/role-architecture-fighting-pandemic/
MASS Design Group — Work and Research on Coronavirus
‘‘Pandemic Within a Pandemic’: Coronavirus and Police Brutality Roil Black Communities’, New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/us/politics/blacks-coronavirus-police-brutality.html?referringSource=articleShare
‘Covid Updates: Black And Brown New Haveners Hit Hardest’, New Haven Independent. https://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/homeless_hotel_deal/
CT ‘DATA HAVEN’. https://www.ctdatahaven.org/
