The Common[Unity] Project

Designers

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The Common[Unity] Project

Rethinking how designers approach connecting, collaborating, and engaging with communities

Designers

Christian D'Ostilio

Key Words

SUMMARY

The Common [Unity] Project explores enhancing creative practices for community engagement by leveraging public spaces for deeper community involvement. The project piloted itself with its first Common[Unity] Hub, established in Maria Hernandez Park, which aimed to foster trust and connection through an inviting and symbolic space. The project's learnings will be transformed into a series of research and prototyping card questions aimed to be used by designers to help inspire their own collaborative and creative community engagement spaces.

challenge

In the homogenous world of the constructed environment profession, there is an actively wide gap in community engagement practice. As identified in NYC's urban planning/design, practitioners have good intentions with trying to diversify their community engagement but fall short and do not know how to create a wider reach. The key theme of research throughout this entire capstone year was representation. Representation was my foundation point in approaching more creative community engagement, prioritizing the design of my engagement practice to reflect representations of community values and traits. My design intervention subsequently identified public space as a leverage point for holding space for community connection and trust building.

Outcome

The project made a powerful statement about the importance of focusing on community fostering and collaboration before the design process even begins. Although the Common[Unity] Hub was not used directly to get participatory input for an active design/development project, it was successful for how meaningful holding a third space was for a community. Additionally, it gave me fundamental insights into how designers should think about engaging, connecting, and building fundamental trust with individuals so that a collaboration process can become more meaningful and robust for their design process.