Design Game Seward Campus Rooftop

Design Game: Seward Campus Rooftop, 350 Grand Street, Manhattan In this design game you will use information from a real place to create design ideas. Goal: You will design an imaginary park. This place will grow food that can be served in the school cafeteria and in SummerMeals in the neighborhood, while meeting the needs of teenagers and teachers, during the school year, after school, and summer. You'll work as a team to create a design. When your design is finished you'll take a digital photo of it, or draw it. You’ll show it to other teams and make changes to your design based on their response. Rules: Everyone plays the design game together equally. Everyone moves pieces at the same time. This game follows a 5 step Participatory Design Process: 1) Organizing 2) Fact Finding 3) Generating Design Ideas 4) Creating a Design 5) Building the Place. 1. Organizing Imagine your design team has already been elected by members of your community to design food gardens on the rooftop at the Seward Campus. You've organized your plan, and you've set up your scheduled times to meet. 2. Fact Finding: Your team has learned the following information from surveys, interviews, and studies of the roof and neighborhood: The roof is shaped like an E, with North at the top of the E. The long part of the E is 285’ long by 60’ wide, and each of the shorter parts are 60’ by 100’. The area has full sun all day. The wind blows from south to north west across the site. There are drains, but some are blocked and puddles form in the northern part of the roof. The roof is used by all 5 schools in the building for student events, gardening, physical education, and classes. It’s used after school, summer and weekends for events. The school sits right on the border of Chinatown and the Lower East Side and is culturally diverse. Nearby are food stores, small businesses, parks and hundreds of neighbors. In surveys about the roof Teenagers said they would love to have art, seating, plants, and beautiful clean areas. They'd also love to have a place to play a variety of sports. They'd like to raise food plants after school and summer to sell, and for the cafeteria. Teachers want a place where they can take students for classes, a place to have performances, garden beds, and a place where educational projects can take place. Neighbors would like to have access at times to the roof, to have a place where people can go to get peace and quiet to read a book, a place to grow plants, and lie on grass. Look at a map from www.oasisnyc.org to learn additional information about this site. 3. Generating Design Ideas: You are Here: Today you will generate design ideas that represent all the ideas gathered from surveys, interviews, and neighborhood studies. Have everyone on the team move pieces around on the model. 4. Creating a Design: The design on the model will keep changing until you all decide the design meets the needs of all the groups. If one group is still not having its needs met in your design, work on your design until it works for everyone. If you argue or disagree, stay respectful, and keep going back to the site & people information to make your point. 5. Building the Place When your design meets all of the group's needs you have won this game. Imagine your team will now build this beautiful place for your community. copyright 2000 Participatory Design by Paula Hewitt

Draw more game pieces like these ones below. Cut them out and move them around on the base map to the right to represent areas in your design

Garden bed

Garden bed

Garden bed

benches

Seating area

Tree

bush