Garden Tweets:
An Interactive Community Garden Piece
TIMELINE: 6 weeks
GROUP PROJECT: Korene Embrack, Easton Nguyen, and I
OBJECTIVE: Design and build an urban installation to foster social cohesion and playfulness somewhere within the Weinland Park District.
TOOLS USED: Laser Cutter, Wood Lathe, 3D Printer, Circular Saw, Hand Tools
Instructed by Dr. Sébastien Proulx
LOCATION ANALYSIS:
To start this project, as a class, we walked around the Weinland Park district to understand the area and the people who live there. In doing so, my team stumbled upon a community garden. During our visit, the garden appeared pretty empty and gloomy, especially since it was early March. Seeing the Google Maps photo of the garden full of greenery during the sunny months, the team saw an opportunity to add playfulness and life back to the garden, especially during the gloomier months.
INITIAL CONCEPT:
Based on the observations, the team saw lots of opportunities to add playfulness to the garden in different forms, so we began ideating.
Our initial ideas had the potential of providing playfulness within the garden, but they lacked a way for them to be sustained without input from outside sources. So we decided to return to the garden to get further inspiration.
OBSERVATION & FEEDBACK:
When we returned to the garden, we decided to make a more detailed observation of the activity levels around the garden. We also took the opportunity to speak with a couple of neighbors of the garden. From our observations and conversations, three things stood out:
CONCEPT REFINEMENT:
With our new findings in mind, we began brainstorming ways to make people more aware of the space and see it as an opportunity to interact with others in a playful manner. This is when we had the idea of creating a sign for people to leave messages back and forth to one another.
The only thing was, we wanted a way to make not only people more interested in the garden but also in birds.
We came up with the idea of creating birdhouses to go along with the sign. The sign would create a space for conversation between neighbors by personifying the birds living in birdhouses. We also had the idea to have the birdhouses reflect parts of different houses around the neighborhood so that people could more personally connect with the birds.
BUILDING PLAN:
With our concept in hand, we created a plan to build a prototype of the concept for display in the garden.
To create the birdhouse, we used Google Maps to take screenshots of architectural features from various houses in different parts of the district. We then used those features captured to 3D model one example birdhouse before building the actual thing with wood and 3D printed details.
To build the post the birdhouse would sit on, we took inspiration from Google Map screenshots of posts and used a wood lathe to create a post of our own.
For the sign, we had to decide how we would make it interactable so that people could create their own message on the sign. We decided to use French cleats so the letters/words could easily be hung up on the board. To build the sign, we used wood for its durability and to match the birdhouse and post.
https://images.app.goo.gl/2a8PvXNvaM3tt75q7
FINAL BUILD & INSTALLATION:
For displaying the final prototypes, we added a flat base to the birdhouse post and added three large hooks to the top of the sign so it could hang on the side of the small sitting area. Below are photos of the final prototypes installed in the garden.
