The Place Agency project delivered a suite of educational and practice-based programs on placemaking and place development for graduate-level students and early-career placemakers.
This project was run as a collaboration between 7 universities across Australia simultaneously.
Newport Placemaking Studio
In this studio students had the opportunity to learn from local experts, business owners and artists, and then showcase their idea to the community with a temporary insulation.
I learned how to use many different mediums to communicate with the community and the challenges of such situations.
I learned how to be a much better listener, allow other people without a design background to express their idea, and how to build upon that.
Read more about the learnings from Newport Studio.
Shakespeare Street Placemaking Workshop
As part of my work with Place Agency, I studied how to engage teenagers and kids in the placemaking process. For that I ran a placemaking workshop for Carlton Scouts members.
The workshop was designed to guide the scouts through the observation, design and construction process of temporary structures at the Shakespeare Street tiny park.
The first 2 days of the workshop went successful. Scouts identified the issues and opportunities of the Shakespeare Street park, work on their ideas and developed their designs.
Unfortunately, however, on the third day, one of the neighbours stopped our event. This neighbour approached the scouts that were in the park building their designs and started shouting at them, telling them their work is bad, and they should stop.
Solving this issue that day, talking to the neighbour, protecting the scouts and finding a solution was a big challenge that day. A challenge that I managed to overcome by keeping my cool, thinking on my feet and not giving up.
I realised that route of the community member's opposition to the scouts' project was that they felt they were not included in the discussion. Even though we had several community consultation session beforehand and invited all the residents of Shakespeare street, this neighbour did not feel they should attend the sessions.
That inspired me to design the below modular table, to facilitate communication about the design with the community at the location f the project. Providing an opportunity for those who can not make it to the meetings, get a look at the design and have their say.
Modular Model Display Stand
How to turn a failure into an opportunity.
This table is for displaying a model outdoors as part of a placemaking workshop. This device assists a placemaking workshop organiser in communicating the design to the rest of the users at a specific site. After they have come up with a design at the placemaking workshop, they can display their design at the location, for all the other users to see and interact with it. In this way, the design itself becomes the urban intervention.
This table is designed for easy transport and easy assembly. When it is apart the table can fit easily in the boot of a car, for easy transport. And then the colour coded joints helps for an easy and quick assembly.
Regenerative Placemaking
Regenerative Placemaking explained in the animation below.
This is an example of when I went above and beyond the project deliverables, to improve outcome.
Dr Dominique Hes only asked me for an illustration to explain the regenerative placemaking concept. I felt that animation will do a better job. I started with a storyboard, then teaching myself Adobe After Effect, Audition and Premier, to make the animation for teaching Regenerative Placemaking.
That was the start of many more videos that I worked on.
Learn more here.
Rating Place Framework
See my work here.