The Future of Brownfields - Calumet Region
USER RESEARCH + SYSTEMS DESIGN
The Future of Brownfields is an ongoing collaboration between IIT-Institute of Design and the Calumet Collaborative. During the first phase of the project (November 2017 - May 2018), the collaboration proposed five strategies for exploring brownfield redevelopment as critical paths for regional regeneration: leverage assets, empower science, involve residents, strengthen local economies, and build integrated infrastructures. While these strategies were used to inform the prototype of three concrete interventions in phase 2, the phase 3 advanced these micro-pilots by iterating and refining those infrastructures prototyped and co-designing alternative models for scaling up implementation and impact. This report refers to efforts underlying the Act Calumet concept.
This project took place in Spring 2018, over the course of 14 weeks. The first 7 weeks focused on 7 rounds of in-context prototyping in the Calumet Region with a heavy integration of technology, whereas the next 7 weeks focused on developing and refining 5 concrete service concepts. The class heavily relied on co-design workshops, collaborations with community organizations and continuous site visits.
CLIENT: Calumet Collaborative
SPONSORS: Fidelity Labs, Hitachi Inc.
TEAM MEMBERS: Rotating teams
GUIDED BY: Dr. Carlos Teixeira, Andre Nougeira
MY ROLE: Design Researcher and Service Strategist
In my role as a researcher and strategist, I:
formed research strategies and conducted 12h in observations, 8 interviews, and 3 site surveys. Co-created the Systems Dynamics map and the socio-technical-ecological scales for thee region based on the data.
generated ideas, prepared prototypes, and conducted 4 rounds of iterative in-context prototyping with my team in the Calumet region.
helped drive the panel discussions of our class with 5 regional experts and community leaders, and facilitated one of the few co-design workshops with 25 experts and stakeholders from our partner organization.
developed one of the four solution concepts that were finalized, and detailed out the affordances and features of our intervention along with the visualizations.
was one of the 4 classmates responsible for the following report as well.
The Impact:
The final four ideas developed in this class garnered attention, and we received additional funding to develop each idea further. This became topics for upcoming classes as well as summer projects for students. The community leaders started opening up to outside interventions after decades of disappointment from the sytstems.
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