How might a city agency make access to outdoor natural spaces a more safe, reliable, and inclusive experience for BIPOC visitors?
The Challenge
How might the Forest Preserves of Cook County (FPCC) make access to outdoor natural spaces a more safe, reliable, and inclusive experience for BIPOC visitors?
The Solution
One vision, three principles and six strategies to guide future inclusive programming and policy-making at the FPCC. Read the full report here.
The Impact
FPCC staff used the strategies we crafted to evaluate their existing programming, which yielded insights about changes to current programming. Our team was invited to continue working on the project over the summer.
Time: 15 weeks, Spring 2022
Sector: Civic
Client: Forest Preserves of Cook County
My role: Design researcher
Services:
Participant recruitment
Workshop facilitation
Insight discovery
Strategic visioning
What makes this project unique?
Previous efforts by the FPCC to increase BIPOC visitorship had centered around one-time events such as BIPOC Yoga in the Park. Although these events were valuable, they didn’t address the systems-level elements that create racist outcomes. In contrast, this project provided an opportunity to create a systems-level vision for change led by the people with lived experience of the problem. The combination of the two things - a systems-level focus and BIPOC co-designers as the visionaries for change - yielded a compelling new vision for the FPCC, as well as a practical set of steps for realizing that vision.
1. Challenge
Systemic challenges: Totaling almost 70,000 acres, the Forest Preserves of Cook County (FPCC) is the oldest, largest forest preserve in the United States. Since their establishment in 1914, the Preserves have been an important place of natural connection for millions of city-dwellers. However, they remain largely inaccessible to many BIPOC Chicagoans as a result of redlining, violent policing, disinvestment in low-income neighborhoods and limited public transportation options. As a result, 85% of park visitors are White, even though White people only comprise 45% of the Chicago population (Black people are 29%).
How systemic barriers show up in daily life: Our team drew upon the work of a previous class of co-designers who investigated why many BIPOC Chicagoans choose not to visit natural spaces. They found that there are four main barriers:
Lack of adequate transportation to the parks
Lack of preparation and equipment
Lack of other BIPOC visitors to the park
Concerns about racial profiling and hate crimes
For this project, our goal was to convene a new group of BIPOC co-designers to envision solutions to these barriers. Our team focused in particular on transportation barriers to the parks.
2. Research + Insights
11 BIPOC co-designers
2 co-design workshops
5 physical prototypes
Research methods included two co-design workshops, elicitation activities and physical prototyping to test out ideas (1 of 8).
Inspired by KA McKercher, we used a co-design approach based in power sharing and relationship building (2 of 8).
Prototyping each workshop before inviting co-designers to join helped us refine activities for optimal hospitality and engagement (3 of 8).
In the first workshop, we invited co-designers into a fictional scenario and had them map their emotional experience of the imagined situation (4 of 8).
Each co-designer created a tool that would make it easier for them to visit the park. Ideas included a carpooling app and a marketing campaign (5 of 8).
We found there were three main areas of concern about transportation to the parks. We used these as prompts for the second workshop (6 of 8).
We asked the second group of co-designers to propose a park transportation system that addressed the areas of concern from the first workshop (7 of 8).
After the two workshops, we synthesized the data into themes, insights, principles and strategies, all of which combined to create a single unifying vision (8 of 8).
3. Solution
Sharing the vision with FPCC leaders
We presented this vision and set of strategies to leaders from the Forest Preserves of Cook County in an interactive workshop. After detailing our process and explaining the principles generated from the co-design workshops, we invited FPCC staff to evaluate one of their current programs using these principles.
It was exciting to see how this short exercise generated fruitful discussion and concrete ideas for how to make the FPCC more inclusive, equitable and anti-racist.
The FPCC was pleased with our work and invited our entire team to consult with them on another project during the summer.
We used the POEMS (people, objects, environment, messages, services) framework to evaluate an existing FPCC program using the newly generated principles (1 of 3).
Workshop participants gathered to share reflections at the end of the workshop (2 of 3).
All the co-design students together with some of the FPCC partners (3 of 3).
4. Impact
Client Impact
The Forest Preserves of Cook County, the nation’s oldest park system that serves millions of visitors each year, has the tools and vision to create an anti-racist programming strategy that moves beyond one-time interventions.
These tools can be used to evaluate existing programming as well as create new programs.
The FPCC’s invitation to continue working on the project suggests that they saw value in co-design methodologies; hopefully this partnership will pave the way for future collaborations between FPCC and participatory design teams.
Personal Impact & Learnings
Learning about co-design helped me see more clearly the ways in which traditional human-centered design practices can be harmful. I hope to bring the co-design practices of hospitality, power sharing, capacity building and valuing lived expertise to as many future projects as possible.
With a limited budget and limited social networks beyond the Institute of Design, one of the biggest challenges we faced in this project was recruiting people for the workshops. If I were to do it again, I would seek out additional funding so we could compensate the co-designers more adequately for their time and provide additional incentives for participation.
Team
Team: Emery Donovan, Yonghak Kim, Sunaina Kuhn and Ron Martin
Final report prepared in collaboration with additional members of the co-design class: Elizabeth Graff, Luce James, Taka Kato and Latrina Lee
Faculty advisors: Chris Rudd & André Nogueira