On Memory: Design Brigade Week 6.
Framing our designs.
This week our team prepared for the meeting we are hosting on Wednesday, July 15 with city officials and community leaders. We have been finalizing materials for our preliminary design ideas and strategizing how to communicate these ideas in a manner that will set the stage for discussion and collaboration. In addition, this week we welcomed two new team members, Abraham and Zishi, who are both M.Arch students at YSOA. We are very excited to have them on the team!
In onboarding our new members, we took a moment to reflect upon and communicate the core tenets of our team’s mission and reevaluate some aspects of our workflow. With the expansion of the team came the opportunity to reground our project in our purpose and revisit some of the initial research we developed about memorials and the City of New Haven.
Joining the Team as New Members
The following paragraphs are written by Abraham and Zishi-
Using various organizational tools, we reorganized our workflow to ensure that tasks were being completed. As new members of the team, we were confused about what the end goal of the project was. The initial push for community outreach became the most salient component of the project, and we began wondering how designers negotiate their agency with those of an afflicted community. Designing memorials comes with its own set of constraints, and joining a project for families affected by COVID-19 made us keenly aware of how this health crisis has disproportionately affected Latinx, Black, and Indigenous communities both nationally and locally. The team stressed the importance of developing true community partnerships, where the project is developed collaboratively, as opposed to a prescriptive top-down approach.
WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE WHY
An exercise in community building we asked the current team to define the project in terms of the 5-W’s exercise. Defining these were the most effective way of aligning everyone’s vision towards a unified goal. In doing so we developed a deeper understanding of the different stakeholders involved in city projects and how we as designers can effectively organize the community and synthesize disparate goals and motivations associated with memorials and the act of memorializing.
CONTINUING TO MAP NEW HAVEN
Our initial task was to familiarize ourselves with New Haven and the city’s experience with COVID-19. We continued the team’s work on mapping the impact of COVID-19 by looking at the most affected neighborhoods. We wanted to understand where a memorial would best be situated by looking at bus routes, brownfield sites, public art work, schools, nurseries, and hospitals in New Haven.
Preparing for July 15th Presentation: Four Ideas
In our presentation on Wednesday, we are planning on sharing 4 categories of design ideas. We want to provide our clients with options for what this memorial could look like. Is it a single-sited memorial or a memorial with many sites spread out throughout the city? Is this an ephemeral intervention (such as a website or series of events) or a more durable, physical space (like a park)? With feedback from our clients, we hope to refine the direction of our design, potentially combining components from more than one of the following proposals.
Virtual Healing Space (Single-Site, Ephemeral)
The virtual memorial will honor, acknowledge, and provide a healing space for those who have been affected by Covid-19. Our proposal will have three main pages: Breath, Reflect, and Heal.
- BREATH: there will be guided meditations and breathing exercises. There will also be interactive breathing visualizers that will guide you through your breath. Breath is vital to life and an awareness of breath is heightened in this time of pandemic and protest. To gather one’s breath is foundational to the healing process.
- REFLECT: This page will have archives, interviews, and testimonials from families and community members who have been affected by Covid-19. Visitors of the site will be able to tell their own stories and share with others.
- HEAL: Activity, community, and gathering is important to collective and individual healing. In this page, there will be a directory of healing spaces in New Haven. This includes Green spaces, breathing spaces, yoga studios, community events, and other resources.
The website could be in the form of a web app or phone app and is meant to be a resource for healing. It will be a constantly changing site that addresses the ongoing pandemic. While a digital memorial may be ideal for its immediacy and mutability, its audience and outreach will be determined by those who have access and desire to use this platform.
Brownfield /Art Park (Single-Sited, Durable)
The Brownfield/Art Park project would take a contaminated brownfield site, remediate the land, and create a park filled with pieces by local New Haven artists. In this scenario, the city would be able to use some state and federal funding for brownfield remediation to replace soil and do other remediation work. This alone is a public health service to the community. Then local artists would be commissioned to create pieces that speak to the experience of the pandemic for the community, and together these would form the art park. This project would provide dual healing — it would heal a piece of land while also allowing people to heal and reflect in this new green space and in relation to the art in the park
Our memorial seeks to address the impacts of a public health crisis that has affected people disproportionately along lines of race and class. Similarly, environmental justice issues, such the pollution emanating from brownfield sites, disproportionately threaten the health of low-income and communities of color. If the city were to undertake this plan, it would be a substantive action towards ideals of urban health equity. Cleaning up a brownfield site would remove contamination from a neighborhood, turning a space that was toxic into a space of healing.
Mobile Healing Spaces (Multi-Sited, Ephemeral)
In the context of covid, the idea of a memorial is multi-sited since the pandemic has touched upon all neighborhoods in New Haven. As an intermediate memorial, we propose pop-up meditation, healing, and spaces of remembrance that can be broken down and moved to new locations or, if wanted, kept on sites that wish to keep them. This recognizes the profound need for healing infrastructure in multiple neighborhoods. A recent precedent for this is the Juneteenth Altar to honor Black New Haven Women at the Goffe St. Armory. These mobile structures aim to accommodate varying weather conditions and encompass elements of shade/covering, seating/physical organization, and potentially elements of sound.
Community Greenhouses (Multi-Sited, Durable)
The importance of gardens and greenspaces continues to come up a lot in our outreach. In an effort to have a system of localised memorial interventions into New Haven’s various neighborhoods, the City could potentially work with some of New Haven’s many community gardens.* Our hope here is to present a ‘kit of parts’ for a structural addition to gardens and green spaces (e.g. shaded rest area, lamp posts, benches, etc.) that will be both beautiful and functional. The structure would then be assembled and decorated by the neighborhood as a group activity.
We are specifically proposing community garden greenhouses, which could be safe spaces for meditation and healing, as well as a year-long green space nestled within each community. We hope to address the devastation of this time, but also the compassion, togetherness and resilience exhibited by the City. We hope that the ideas of growth, breath, and healing that manifest in this greenhouse are a way of capturing this.
*We recognize this idea requires a lot more outreach to the various communities, as well as Gather New Haven (formerly the New Haven Land Trust) and URI, who support many of these gardens. We only hope to propose it to the City before moving forward.
Continued Engagement: Survey
This week we completed a Google form survey to continue gathering input from as many people as possible. The survey provides options in both English and Spanish. If you are a resident of New Haven, we would be so grateful if you took a few minutes to fill it out. The link is here. Please share it with other New Haveners. If you have a way to distribute this survey so that it reaches more people, we would love to collaborate with you. Please reach out to us at onmemory.nh@gmail.com.
Next Steps
- Present to and facilitate a discussion with a group of individuals from the city and the community (Weds, July 15)
- Based on feedback from our Wednesday meeting, narrow the scope of the project and further develop designs
- Update and reorganize our website (onmemory.cargo.site) to reflect recent work we have done and create a venue to collect input digitally.
- Continue the outreach and engagement process through meetings and the distribution of our survey
Additional Resources
‘The New Ideology of Race,’ The Economist.
‘To Design a Better Future, Embrace the Uncomfortable,’ by Elger Oberwelz. IDEO, The Journal.
