This week we finally had the opportunity to meet our community partner Hermann Park Conservancy! Although, we almost got lost on the way,  we were on time for our meeting. Julia McGowen, who is the Marketing and Communications Manager of Hermann Park Conservancy, introduced us to David Renninger, Director of Operations and Doreen Stoller, the President of Hermann Park Conservancy. During the meeting we were able to observe three different perspectives, but a unified definition of sustainability. HPC defined sustainability as balancing  health, social, economical and environmental benefits. They explained that the community has been part of keeping the park sustainable without realizing. Their vision for the project is to showcase that people play an important role on keeping the park sustainable. They also expressed the fact that they were looking for something that will be durable and be a part of the park for a long period of time.

Our meeting with Hermann Park Conservancy helped us shape our path for the rest of the semester. After revising our previous research, we were able to gather the important insights to move forward with, such as,

• Community involvement is an essential part of sustainability
• Hermann Park Conservancy aims to showcase the involvement of the people in the park’s sustainability
• A lot  people choose to visit Hermann Park as groups.#squads

We also set some goals for our design goals for our project. We decided we wanted make something interactive, fun, informative, attractive to all ages, durable and harmonious with the park.  Due to the nature of our project we had a hard time finding measures of success that were quantitative, but we were able to come up with three important measures that we will be able to test on.  We believe that  we would be able to measure the spread of age demographics with a positive responses and the number of people noticing/ interacting with the design.

We also predicted that the lack of showcasing of  the public involvement generates a disconnection between Hermann Park and park goers. Therefore increasing the connection between through displaying the involvement will increase the sense of community in Hermann Park.

Finally, we compiled our research in to a broad how can we statement that focuses on the squads of Hermann Park, because we during our user interviews we mostly interacted with groups of people.

How can we make #squads at HP more aware of the community involvement at HP?

#squads #ignoranceisnotbliss