Team: Clara Bradford, Hannah Liu, Shannon Stussy

Duration: 3 weeks

Location: Amsterdam, NL

My Role: Interviews, Mapping, Observation, Ideation

Overview

Throughout cities and places around the world, we see the need for interventions that will bring people together in such a way that will benefit the individuals living in those communities. Successful placemaking is making a public space intervention adaptable and programming it so that it can consistently evolve shape to serve the needs of a community and its people (Dekker, 2019). Over the course of 3 weeks, while studying at the University of Amsterdam, our team worked to use the placemaking method at the University of Amsterdam’s Science Park campus to create fun learning opportunities that also brought community members together.

The Outreach Department of the University of Amsterdam (two faculty members being our project partners) presented us with the following challenge:

“How can we, the Outreach Department, trigger citizens of the adjacent neighborhoods to come to Science Park and find added benefit?”

Assumptions

Prior to really digging into our problem space, we started with the following assumptions that we hoped to uncover answers to through our research:

• People feel a barrier to UvA’s Science Park and to those within it

• Citizens want to connect with each other

The Plan

Research Questions

From our assumptions and the challenge presented to us, we developed the following research questions:

• What is important to the people who work in this space?

  • Why do or don’t they spend time here? (We wanted to answer this same question for those who live in the surrounding areas.)

• In what ways can the knowledge that we share with visitors permeate through the community and the rest of Amsterdam in a way that is beneficial for all?

  • While sharing this knowledge, how might we also allow those opportunities to foster positive interactions and relationships community-wide?

Methods

Design Thinking Method:

We used this method to guide us throughout the duration of the 3 weeks, completing one phase of the method per week.

Empathize

Research

Our first week and a half was spent becoming familiar with the placemaking methodology as well as the city of Amsterdam, its people, its history, its ecosystem, and its political climate. We also spent time receiving an overview of key local government policies.

Levels of Public Interaction at Science Park

Based on the theories and concepts studied (in particular Anna Dekker’s “Levels of Public Interactions”, William Whyte’s “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, and Jane Jacobs’ “Eyes on the Street” theory) we analyzed what matters most to people in general regarding human interactions their environment, and we compared this to what resources already exist at Science Park that can help us touch on these important matters.

Agendas, Context, Use, and Desires

While doing our research, we mapped the original challenge question to a model made up of 4 components.

Agendas (Top Down):

Through our lectures, city excursions, and literature reviews we learned about exogenous forces such as local and global political climate, governmental policies and plans, and economics.

Read the details of our literature reviews here.

Use (Flow Analysis):

While spending time doing observations in the city and at Science Park, we looked at the flow of how the city is used through its infrastructure, energy usage, waste, people etc.

Read the details of our observations and interviews here.

Context (Area Approach):

Through mapping out an overview of the space, we saw the existing context of public space, streets, squares, buildings, parking areas, industrial sites, office parks, waterfronts etc. that the spatial intervention would be situated within.

Desires (Bottom Up):

Through interviews we got to know the needs and wishes of local actors and stakeholders such as UvA’s Outreach Department, citizens, and those working/studying at and visiting Science Park.

Read the details of our observations and interviews here.

Creatures of Habit

We found that those who do come to Science Park are either there to work or are a student and don’t spend a lot of time there outside of those responsibilities. They seemed to have a wanting to keep their professional and private life separate outside of annual events.

For those that did spend time at Science Park’s campus outside of work and class, it was spent at the sporting facility or the nearby Cafe Polder. When asked about the community garden (Anna’s Tuin) at Science Park, only those who spent time at Science Park knew about it, but had never been (with the exception of one person who had walked through).

Unintentional Barriers

We found that local neighborhood citizens where often confused by why we would be asking them if they went to Science Park if they were not a student. When we mentioned that there was a community garden and maybe they had heard of that, they all said that they had not heard of it.

It was at this point in our research, when we realized how distant and disconnected those outside of the campus must feel.

Define

Being able to empathize allowed us to examine the different target groups of people that our placemaking intervention at Science Park could have a positive impact on.

Understanding their needs led us to the design ideation phase of the project with a “human-centered” approach. 

Our research showed overlapping insights about the needs of the following target groups:

• Families with young children

• Working-class residents

Due to the overlap, we chose to focus on these target groups of people when coming up with the following design goals.

Design goals:

• Make Science Park a destination

  • A place for young children to play in as well as a space that attracts older children to hang out with friends in an environment where they can also learn

  • A place where people from other neighborhoods can meet

• Make a place that feels separate from school and work place

  • Based on theories about repeated interactions in public spaces creating a feeling that gives a sense of “home”, we wanted to design an intervention that made a space feel more like home rather than work

• Create a place to learn together and share knowledge

  • It was noted from neighborhood interviews that people like sharing time together over food, meeting new people, and sharing of cultures

  • It is the goal of the Outreach Department at UvA to bring knowledge from within its walls to the community around it

Through these design goals we worked to break down any perceived barriers between the University space and the local community. It was our overarching goal create a space that fostered positive interactions while giving those in the space the option to passively or actively learn from each other.

Ideate

Based on these insights gathered, we were able to come up with our design goals which we then used to launch us into the ideate phase of the design thinking process. 

While there were many ideas listed, we ultimately narrowed it down to the two we felt were most feasible with current resources and funds that were available to the university and community.

The following are what we shared with our project partners and we were happy to find them well-received!

Idea 1: Long Table Community Dinners

Goal: Residents can share their cultural background over a medium of food.

These dinners would be hosted on the campus of Science Park outside (weather permitting) and would be regularly scheduled as we found from placemaking theories and concepts that reoccurring events help foster a sense of comfort and predictability.

We felt that this would create a relaxing backdrop for members of the community of all ages to get to know each other over conversation and food.

Idea 2: Overnight Under the Stars

Goal: Families can interact with Science Park in a friendly academic setting.

This would be one night (reoccurring monthly) where kids came to Science Park and learned about topics in the planetary and astronomy sectors of science through the use of the observatory at Science Park.

Run by volunteers who are students or who work at Science Park, this would be a night full of science learning activities where children would also have the opportunity to interact with other children from across the community that they might otherwise never interact with. These interactions would provide a space to share cultures in order to cultivate empathy for others from an early age.

Looking Ahead

Our project partner was excited about both of our ideas and noted that these were both highly achievable possibilities based on the resources that are currently available. As 3 weeks only provided us with the proper amount of time to reach the “Ideation Phase”, prototyping, testing, and further research will be the next steps necessary in this process. Ideally, more stakeholders from our target user groups, stakeholders involved at the university, and possibly local restaurants would need to be interviewed. Even further, it would be beneficial to co-create these ideas in participatory design sessions with stakeholders. At this point we feel that we have enough momentum to carry this project forward with these mentioned next steps.

Reflection

This opportunity to apply design thinking and human-centered philosophies while exploring the field of urban planning was incredibly eye-opening to me. This is an area that I felt I wasn’t familiar with, but once I began learning in class lectures and conducting research in the field, I realized how much overlap there is with the world of user experience design and research. I loved having the opportunity to work with real stakeholders towards implementing a realistic and positive intervention in the community. I keep reflecting on the fact that our lived experience as citizens in this world is just one large “user experience” and how it is programs like these that are crucial to maintaining our human-human interactions. This caused me to reflect on my studies in human-computer interaction. If we can use opportunities provided by technology to maintain these human-human interactions, we need to make sure that we stay intentional throughout the design process. Prior to this program I thought I fully understood this. However, when I was physically put in front of the people you are designing for and are immersed in their environment, it drove the point home even further. Through my studies in the placemaking program, I saw first-hand the need to make sure we are constantly taking into consideration the micro-interactions within the physical and digital ecosystems that are the daily lives of the people we are designing for. All of the exogenous factors like public policies, economics, cultures, and the multitude of things that impact their needs are not going to go away. Knowing this, I loved being able to learn about these factors and use that knowledge to problem solve and design to create a more positive experience for local community that fosters learning and relationships. It is on this level that we start to make the world a better place.