Assignment 4

Timely Tactics: The Strategic Role of Participation in Community Design by Michael Rios


In this essay Rios talks about the case of 'Union Point Park'. The essays main focus is the importance of getting a  strong, powerful group involved in order to make the building of the park possible.
In Oakland in the early 1990's a group of residents in the Fruitvale area began organising clean ups of local parks, trying to deal with local social problems. They later went on to form a community partnership named the Fruitvale Recreation and Open Space Initiative (FROSI). Around the time this was formed the City of Oakland and the Port of Oakland began planning a way to connect Oakland through its historic port area.
In order for a park to be built in the port area, specifically Union Point, FROSI received 3000 signatures and 100 letters of support from local citizens and organisations. Through this huge gesture of support the local government agreed for the park to be built. In order to gain all these signatures the group would have to network, and therefore need connectors and salesmen, to get the people, and to 'sell' the park to them.
The writer, Michael Rios, was the team leader of FROSI and therefore was responsible for gathering a team together. The team consisted of architects, landscape architects and artists. These people are all, in a way, mavens when it comes to park design. Also a part of the team were community organizers, such as the Unity Council, The city of oakland parks department, the trust for public land and the university of oakland forum. These people can work as salesmen within the project, they have the influencial power to get approval and funding for the whole project. The fact Rios gathered such a diverse team makes him a connector.
The Union Park project also included teenagers, an even more diverse group of people to be involved, offering a different point of view and also allowing different areas of the community to be more accessible. One teen even spoke at a press conference, gaining a lot of media coverage and also succesfully increasing the amount of funding allocated to the park.
In a sense, the FROSI group had a very different group of people working together, and knowing this, used it to the best of their advantage. They networked, petitioned, held events and meetings, and got the approval and funding that they needed. The success of the project is down to collaborative design and everyone working together, clearly a successful way to manage a project.
At the time of the publication of this book community design was becoming more and more popular, with over 30% of North American architecture schools running community design centres, in order to engage the public. This allows communications with architects and the public to flow more freely and allow a lot more people to participate in the design process. This shows how popular it was about six years ago, and popularity has only grown.






The New School collaborates: Organization and communication in immersive international field programs with artisan communities by Cynthia Lawson.


This article focuses more on making collaborative design more available. It talks about how currently with the current world population of about 6.5 billion 90% have little or no access to architectural services the other 10% take for granted.  The article then makes the point that it is our responsibility to lower this percentage and to do this by educating current design students through  collaborative design.  The New School  Collaborates(TNSC) is a cross-divisional  and interdisciplinary  faculty  research  group at The New School  (TNS),  a university  in New York City. TNSC are particularly interested in how students working across other disciplines outside of their own and out-with their university surroundings. This not only allows students to work with other people with other expertise but also people from different backgrounds and surroundings, offering new points of views. A prime example of this is given in the article, when a group of people from the humanitarian group CARE and also representatives from TNS visited Guatemala, to work with a group of Mayan woman creating a business model with their existing handcrafted products. Although the products were of great quality, local people had little expertise with basic business skills therefore their products weren't as successful as they could be. A group of students from the local university were brought in to help work with the project thus building on their academic skills as well as allowing them to help the Mayan women. Through the collaboration between all these different organisations it allows the business to prosper in ways it wouldnt without all the different people together. Lawson also makes the point that the participants all have an equal participation in the process, all making valid contributions. 
Ovidio Morales,  Dean of the School  of Architecture and Design in  the Guatemalan

Universidad  Rafael Landivar, where the students participating in the project came from, said that  "...design professionals  should be potential agents of change  in society,  to make  it more  human, more just, and more democratic." 
This is very true, and is also very valid with this case. To me collaborative design is best utilised when the project is a worthy one, and helping out the Mayan artisans of Guatemala is more than worthy. Lots of problems had to be overcome, the women had little knowledge of basic business skills, and some technical skills such as sewing, to help finalise their products. Bringing in experts in all of these different areas helped get their business to its highest potential and overcoming all these problems makes the cause seem even more worthy in the end. The project is also even more worthy as the business model was specifically designed so it can be used in other environments and isn't specific to the Mayan artisans. This shows just how successful the project was, it could be used in any other country, involving any other organisations, any other university students can be involved. I think the main point Lawson was trying to make was that students should be more educated in collaborative design participating in more projects out-with the university environment and projects like these are perfect ways to go about achieving this.




In both Rios' essay and Lawson's article a case study is provided as an example, Union Point Park and the Mayan artisans. Both are worthy causes in different ways. I think that's what makes collaborative design work, many different people get involved because they believe in the cause. I am a big believer in design being worthwhile and think both cases were good examples of this and was very interested to read into them, just as I previously have with other design organisations and projects (i.e Design Corps, dott...). Both make a good point that all participants in the process have equal importance, without certain groups of people the project would just not be the same, for example with union park without local citizens the project may have never even happened as it was their support that got the project moving. The union park point project was a good example of showing the ways collaborative projects have a lot more power, more people being involved means more networking and more connections, which allowed more connections with politicians and other people with power to gain funding, planning permission etc.. Also having so many people involved gave the project a real identity and a sense of community, motivating people to get involved in whatever way they could. Everyone involved had skills and just had to utilise them in different ways, working alongside other people with different skills, all of these 'mavens' together built a strong team, showing that the connectors, mavens and salesmen theory in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell works well with this kind of design. With Lawson's case study, groups of people were brought in to help out less skilled people, building upon their basic knowledge to make their business and overall product more powerful. The Mayan artisans of Guatemala had a good basic knowledge of hand crafted products but lacked some basic skills to create a high quality final product and skills to get the product out there and be a success. Bringing in business 'mavens' and also people skilled in the craft industry allows the Mayan women to learn about how to make their products a success, not just be pushed out of the picture and taken advantage of. The addition of students being allowed on the project also allows them to learn and get experience in collaborative design, which is steadily growing more popular with more architecture schools running community design centres, meaning our current generation of students are well prepared for participatory design and can keep on building and improving the process. The project prepares students to work with people out-with their discipline and also, citizens, local organizations, politicians... A wide variety, rather than the small world within their campus boundaries. I feel that this is the way forward and think many current design courses could benefit from projects like these. It allows students to network and meet a variety of people from different backgrounds, with different skills and different points of view, opening peoples eyes to the world around them that just cant be experienced properly from a studio.






Bibiliography


Gladwell, M. (2001). The Law of the Few. In: The Tipping Point. Great Britain: Little, Brown. p30-p88.


John M, Cary, Jr., ACSA Sourcebook of Community Design Programs, Washington, D.c.: ACSA Press, 2000


Lawson, C. (2010). The New School collaborates: Organization and communication in immersive international field programs with artisan communities. Visible Language. 44 (2), p 239 - p 265.


Rios, M. (2004). Timely Tactics: The Strategic Role of Participation in Community Design. In: Bell, B Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture . New York: Princeton Architectural Press.