Dec 17–Dec 21 Programming Workshop
Exercise 1: As a way of soliciting visual representations of the ideas participants have about their ideal physical environments, Soapbox Theory and our guest hosts asked participants to draw—or otherwise represent visually—”Their Island”. Who lives there? What are the spatial characteristics? What things are important to have on the island? Participants were given 5 minutes to create their island
Exercise 2 – Now, Update Your Island At the conclusion of the discussion period where participants were asked to share and describe their islands, the Design Team asked participants to envision that 20 years had passed: how had their islands changed? What has stayed the same? Who lives there now and what are they focused on doing?
Some participant drawings:
The second interactive portion of the Programming Workshop centered on encouraging participants to provide visual examples of important physical elements they desire in their community. Because the participants are from a wide variety of ages, with varying levels of familiarity with technology and graphic representation, the Design Team created three distinct breakouts rooms.
Room 1 – I’ll Draw The first breakout room utilized an online charette tool called “Miro”. This room encouraged participants to interact with the platform directly, drawing out ideas, sketching concepts, and generating post-it notes.
Room 2 – Draw For Me The second breakout room also utilized the online charette tool Miro, but provided participants with a facilitator capable of taking direction from the participants to draw their ideas for them.
Room 3 – Analog The third breakout room did not utilize the online charette tool Miro. Instead, three pre-populated slides prompted participants to volunteer visual content or examples that describe important physical elements to have in their housing, community, and business landscapes.