Brooklyn Bridge Park Pool Participatory Planning
TEAM: LAB AT OPM
YEAR: 2018-2019
UX RESEARCH
CO-DESIGN & FACILITATION
VISUAL DESIGN
Brooklyn Bridge Park is an 85-acre public space. Its community needed a pool. The Brooklyn Bridge Park participatory planning process brought neighbors together to envision an inclusive and dynamic new place.
The Challenge
Brooklyn Bridge Park plays a central role in the lives of Brooklynites, stretching across 1.3 miles of waterfront. Despite the park’s diverse offerings, it lacked a public pool. The Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, a nonprofit that manages the space, sought our help in facilitating a participatory process that would engage park-goers in designing the new pool.
Our Approach
We designed a multi-prong research approach to engaging a wide range of community members. We marketed the initiative as Pool Talks, a months-long campaign to hear from people about their needs and wants for the space. Pool Talks included interviews with community stakeholders, such as community associations and elected officials, disseminating multi-lingual surveys online and at park events, facilitating pop-up activations in the park, and holding two public workshops.
Our team designed and facilitated activations in the park to collect feedback, including surveys at events and an interactive activity.
​Over the course of a few months, we collected feedback from over 2,000 people, from avid parkgoers to long-term residents to more casual users. We supported people to participate in ways that meet their preferences, for example by attending a more in-depth co-design workshop or spending just a few minutes engaging with a tool that used colored yarn to mark perspectives. By offering diverse and compelling ways to participate, we captured a broad spectrum of perspectives from the community.
Its Impact
Our participatory process yielded over 500 ideas, concerns, solutions, and questions. We analyzed this data carefully and developed a series of design recommendations for the pool, focusing on layout, amenities, and programming. We also considered the motivations behind community input to guide the design recommendations.
All of this went into a public-facing Pool Talks Report that I designed and illustrated. Additionally, our team created a rubric to guide the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation’s architectural competition, ensuring that the final pool design adhered closely to our insights and the community’s needs.
