Project for Public Spaces:

MAKE-BELIEVE PLACEMAKING WORKSHOP

Overview.

In 2019, Marion Design Co. hosted a workshop session at the Project for Public Spaces Placemaking Week Conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Community leaders from New York to California filled the room in anticipation of the activities we had planned to spark innovative imagination for leaders of urban and rural placemaking. The intent for each activity was to generate memories of a common childhood imaginative play activity to aid the groups in generating innovative solutions for placemaking in blighted spaces in their communities. Pretending to serve a meal with toy objects at the family dinner table, every element was designed to create a child-like environment one might have experienced in their own home. The participants were to use the cardboard box tables as their prototype space of the blighted area to create a park-like environment, using the toy food objects as small-scaled benches, tables, people, public art sculptures, and other elements to create public places for gathering. At the conclusion of the workshop, each group shared their innovative solutions through a “show-and-tell” presentation, inspiring the participants to carry the ideas back to their communities.

Background.

Placemaking is an intentional practice of creating short and long-term spaces to generate human-centered spaces for people to thrive and create community. Project for Public Space’s Placemaking Conference is an industry-leading event in the field. It was a great context for prototyping and testing a method of collaborative ideation we had been exploring. Marion Design Co. leadership and interns worked in partnership with Indiana Wesleyan University’s Design for Social Impact faculty and students to design a workshop engaging the principles of Placemaking for professionals in the field. Many of the ideas utilized for the workshop were originated by interns as they practiced their own understanding of how to lead people to create through design thinking.

Objectives.

Play

An environment of play was created with every detail. Engaging all of the senses, each group received artificial grass turf, a blanket to drape over chairs to simulate a “tent” shelter, plastic food, and child-sized dinnerware. After instructions were provided for each group, they laid out their patch of grass, began draping the blankets over the chairs, and climbed under the tent to set up their pretend dining table. This intimate environment was the context for strangers to engage in a playful posture.

Placemaking Practices

The placemaking principles of 1) The community is the expert, 2) Create a place, not a design, 3) Look for partners, and 4) Start with Petunias: lighter, quicker, and cheaper were the drivers for the workshop. By engaging team members in a context that was familiar but unexpected, they were able to try out ideas with little cost and few constraints.

Push Limits

The imaginative play environment pushed against predispositions that may have limited creative abilities. The conversations sparked discussion about the difference between placemaking and placekeeping. Understanding the importance of sustainable creative initiatives was emphasized in order to truly create from a human-centered perspective.

Apply Tenderness, Joy, and Hospitality

Understanding that empowering human emotion and empathy can be directives for designing public spaces, the participants were to view their ideas through the eyes of personas assigned to them to create accessible spaces for everyone. This point of view was critical to ensuring ideas were geared toward improving community engagement and expanding public safety.

Process.

What role does make-believe play in the realm of placemaking? Knowing that understanding the user is most critical, personas were created through research for each group to consider as they designed. As the participants engaged in the directed activities, they practiced social and emotional skills, language and communication, nurtured imagination and thinking skills, and sparked curiosity. Each activity was designed to inspire play through nostalgia and childlikeness.

Part 1

The large group was divided into smaller groups and given three personas. They included an immigrant who was undocumented, educated, and loved bingo, a politician who was a senator who was raised on a farm and served in the military, and a citizen who lived in a city, rural community, or suburb.

Part 2

Each group received everything they needed to build a tent and set a table. The kit included a large blanket, chairs, pillows, artificial turf squares, a box for the table, and a name tag. For the meal, they received plastic fruits, vegetables, and meat, and child-sized flatware, cups, plates, and bowls. With these tools, they were able to freely set up a tent and a dining table for everyone to have a meal.

Part 3

Through quick-timed design thinking activities custom-made to raise assumptions to the surface and brainstorm unexpected ideas, each group used the meal objects to build mini-prototype pocket parks for their community. At the conclusion, each group shared their ideas with everyone. The energy in the room was unmatched and many participants approached us afterward letting us know how inspired they were and that they would be applying our techniques in their own communities.

Results.

Through the Make-Believe Placemaking: Designing Public Space through Imaginative Play Workshop, each section of the time was dedicated to activities that built upon the theme of play to spark innovative ideation. Through curiosity, beautiful doubt, and disrupting assumptions, diverse groups worked from a point of view other than their own, to build tents, pretend play, set a table and eat a meal together to invent a pocket park with a sense of community for a public, blighted space. Not only did they take away new ideas for their neighborhood placemaking initiatives, but they also learned a new way of applying design thinking to spark imagination in their communities.