Session G1 - New Techniques for Participatory Design
Professor Emeritus Randolph Hester
Professor Marcia McNally
Associate Professor Kofi Boone, ASLA
This session will introduce new methods for doing participatory design, which is increasingly a requirement for public landscape planning and design projects. Based on the presenters' combined 100 years of practice, and their new book, Design as Democracy, they explain how to do a dozen essential techniques to improve community design. These include: Pop-Up Meeting, Community Camera, Environmental Auto graphy, Cellphone Diaries, The Big Map, Getting a Gestalt, In-House Ah-Ha! Drawing out the Sacred Upside Down, Green Rubber Stamp, Picture Collage Game, and Preemptive Comparison. The session will include a PPT talk and give the audience hands-on experience.
Session G2 - Playing to Learn, Learning to Play: Creating Habitat for Scientists of the Future
Katherine Gill, MLA, PLA
Betsy Towns, PhD
Jocelyn Glazier, PhD
Design processes and design thinking, common practice for landscape architects, can be powerful learning tools for teaching science, especially when landscape architects collaborate with students, educators, artists and ecologists on the design and build of outdoor learning environments. Though examples mount to demonstrate that hands-on, inquiry-driven learning effectively cultivates the critical and creative thinking skills needed for discovery and innovation, mainstream schools have to balance this type of instruction with fact delivery and test prep. Alternative learning environments such as museums, zoos, and farms routinely offer both the capacity to communicate critical knowledge and platforms for prototyping and assessing inquiry-driven methods for teaching and learning. We show how we rely on design practice to create place-specific experiences to allow embodied learning: when students create a nature trail, and conduct creek research, and climb through a landscape that makes them feel the size of ants, students learn their impact on the landscape and how to empathize with creatures that may look different from them. This presentation presents techniques to do design that truly engages students in learning? It also tasks designers to do design that meets educational and ecological imperatives; And, demonstrates models for collaboration and partnering with broad entities to engage in a process of iterating and creating to learn and develop and steward. During the session we speak to our design process, fruitful and frustrating collaborations, and protocols for improving our process and practice.