Although we still haven’t decided on a team name yet, me (Beril Uzmen), David Moon, Viney Raghavan, Aitash Deepak and Kate Landry are very excited to work on this project concerning our neighbor Hermann Park. This will be Aitash and Viney’s first DFA project, we are very enthusiastic to teach them the design process and welcome them to DFA.

Our goal as a team is to help communicate Hermann Park Conservancy sustainability and resilience practices to the park visitors and greater public. We also aim to raise awareness to  the significance of these sustainable practices in Hermann Park. We believe this is going to be a daring issue to tackle , because we are working with a large organization like Hermann Park. We strive to leave a lasting impact on the park and it’s perception.  The lack of knowledge of the public about  Hermann Park’s sustainability efforts was our first assumption going in to this project. We also assume that people usually past by and do not pay attention to the developments in the Hermann Park. Through personal experiences and research, we learned that even a large amount of  regular park goers do not know about the developments in the park, which made us realize various scale of users we can address through this project. On one hand we can concentrate on  raising awareness of the people who regularly go to the park, or we can include the non- Hermann park visitors as a user in our design project as well. Moreover, although it seems like a problem that specifically draws attention to Hermann Park,  there is a possibility that we might come up with a design that can be adapted by other parks. This also shows the large scope and flexibility of our project right now. We believe meeting our community partner Julia McGowen , who is the Marketing and Communications managers at Hermann Park Conservancy,  this week will be helpful to  learn about their design goals and expectations and help us choose a path to move forward with this project. We also need further insight about who they want to target and their measures of success in regards to this project.  So far our team has been more enthusiastic about solutions like designing an installation, but we also considered different options like social events or various types of advertisements to raise awareness.

We are very excited for the rest of the semester. For inspiration and team bonding we will be visiting Hermann Park this week and have a picnic. It will be David’s first time at the park!! Hopefully we will be able to come up with a group name by next week.