Verdant City Spaces

Speculative Design, Design Research, Video Editing, Prototyping, 2021

Created for my Research and Development Methods course, Verdant City Spaces is a speculative design project aiming to save the environment and bring urban communities together through green space. Most of the research here was done utilizing IDEO’s design toolkit.

Collaborators: Alejandra Mateus, Vera Thomas

Proposal

Research

Our research was broken into two stages— primary and secondary. Our primary research allowed us to work co-creatively with out target audience to ensure we were building out spaces that they would enjoy. Our secondary research included the creation of ecosystem and stakeholder maps.

Stakeholder Map

Ecosystem Map

Co-Creative Work

We placed a huge emphasis on making our primary research co-creative. Since community was the basis for our solution, it made sense to incorporate community within the developmental stages.

We surveyed people around the city (yes— we actually approached random people around the city) to pitch our idea and gain an understanding of what they wanted in their respective communities.

Survey

We started our primary research off by documenting current spaces around New York. This assisted in our understanding of what was lacking/could be improved in current spaces.

Photo Documentation

User-Driven Prototyping

The next stage of our process included user-driven prototyping. We asked a series of initial interview questions to identify what was desirable in our green spaces. Next, we had users draw out what they’d like to see.