Urban green spaces can foster community interaction, but can a community-based process be used to design these shared public spaces? And what happens when the vision of community decision-making meets the realities of city, neighborhood, and regional governance?
Doctoral student Elizabeth Goodman explores these challenges in a keynote address in this week’s IDSA International Conference in New Orleans. The 2011 conference, sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America, focuses on community-based design.
Goodman is a doctoral candidate at the School of Information. An interaction designer herself, Goodman’s dissertation research examines the movement of interaction design practice off the desktop to mobile devices, appliances and the world at large. She has taught digital art the San Francisco Art Institute and user experience design research at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has been supported by a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship and an Intel Ph.D. fellowship.
Goodman’s talk, titled “From Park Bench to Satellite: Designing from the Ground Up,” is part of the conference’s “Community as Context” track. She will survey diverse models for making and remaking urban green spaces, as well as presenting tactics for working with cities, neighborhoods and communities to inspire, inform and instruct the design process from the ground up. Along the way, the talk will explore the unique challenges that designers encounter when addressing urban issues as well as groups of individuals.
