Dan and Katie's meeting

This post is to catch Gabriel up on our group meeting tonight.

I posed the question of what was most important to both of us in terms of intervening on the site.

Dan said he would like to reorient the site to the neighborhood and away from tourists, in a way that residents would be invested in the site.

I am most interested in increasing the ability of site users to physically interact with the water, in order to deepen the connection between users and the ecology of the East River.

What is most important to you, Gabriel?

We then established what we thought was common ground amongst the three of us: an interest in ecology, the residential community, and waterfront access.

Then we started to narrow down our interests to try to come up with our strategy. We thought of focusing our audience of the design on the people who live in the public housing projects near the site. We came up with a number of specific points that we need help turning into a strategy:

• Connecting the everyday walking paths/trajectories of public housing residents with the water flows to and around the East River (including urban run off, CSOs, and tides)
• Having people explore the boundaries of the natural environment versus the built environment
• Increasing social interaction and informal ecological education on the site
• As a tactic: leading people to these convergences and shaping the way people navigate through and around the site

We talked about various tactics involving chalk, tape, and string signage and path defining.

Let's think about how we can pull this all together for our meeting on Tuesday at 6:30pm.