Placemaking at Boxville
Project Description
Through partnership with Boxville, a shipping container-based market, we developed three spatial design concepts that would allow Boxville to better serve its entrepreneurs and the local Bronzeville community. I, along with my team, engaged in multiple field visits, conducted qualitative research, developed concepts, site schemes, and service models in preparation for the possible implementation of the final concepts.
Client
Boxville, Chicago’s first shipping container-based retail center and street food market, exists as a response to a long history and cycle of disinvestment, disengagement, and blight experienced by Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood and other adjacent black communities in Chicago. With its unique infrastructure, physical and social, Boxville seeks to remove many of the barriers experienced by inner city entrepreneurs while also revitalizing the historic Bronzeville community.
Project Role
Design Researcher and Strategist
Project Team
Julian Walker
Zack Schwartz
Royce (Parker) Joyner
Vaaibhav Bhardwaj
Oluwatosin Kayode
Project Advisor
Martin Thaler
Location
Bronzeville Neighborhood, Chicago IL
Project Brief
The Institute of Design partnered with Boxville in order to develop concepts for two new shipping containers they are hoping to bring to Boxville. The first of these containers was the Community Box, a space to support current and future entrepreneurs and Boxville administrative needs. The second container was the Service Box, an onsite service offering at Boxville that would support the well-being of the community by providing opportunities to engage in or learn some type of skilled work.
Ethnographic Research
My team and I conducted site visits along with a number of contextual interviews with Boxville’s management team and marketplace entrepreneurs in order to understand:
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Management’s current business strategy and capabilities
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Management and entrepreneurial visions for growth
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The relationship between Boxville and its entrepreneurs
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The relationship between Boxville and the community
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The relationship between Boxville entrepreneurs
Our overarching goal was to gain insight on the types of experiences that might allow Boxville’s stakeholder to leverage those relationships and collective resources to help each other move forward in ways that were meaningful to them.
Synthesis
We used a number of techniques such as clustering and laddering in or to move from understanding people and context to framing insights. We settled on five insights which we shared with Boxville’s management team in order to get feedback and determine how to best move forward with concept prototyping. Using the insight discussion as a springboard, we also facilitated a brief joint ideation session which we used to develop more targeted characteristics of the community box and service box mentioned in the original brief.
Ideation and Concept Development
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The next step in our process was to utilize our insights along with the feedback from the ideation session to develop a succinct set of design principles that would guide our concept development. From those principles came seven initial design concepts, four for the service box and three for the community box. We socialized the seven concepts with Boxville’ management team where we facilitated a session to prioritize the concepts and chose three to move forward with for further development.
Placemaking and Implementation
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After the final concepts had been selected for advancement our next step was to understand how those concepts might be physically integrated into the Boxville marketplace. Taking into consideration a number of variables, including but not limited to, the potential needs of stakeholders in the space, maximizing the value of participant interactions, and Boxville’s financial resources available for the project, we developed two schemes displaying how the concepts could exist in the marketplace. Because one of the concepts we developed was a service (Boxville Tours), we also developed two potential service models in order to help Boxville management understand how they might implement such a service.
Reflections​
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Including Community Members in Contextual Research - Because of time constraints, covid constraints, and a clear and efficient method for connecting with community members that interact with Boxville, our contextual research excluded this key stakeholder group and only focused on Boxville’s management team and its marketplace entrepreneurs. Although some of these individuals were also community members, if I had it to do over again I would love to involve community members as part of our research, both observational and contextual. While I think that the concepts we developed have the potential to serve the community well, I think the involvement of community members might have led to richer insights and stronger concepts.
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Co-creation with Key Stakeholders for Concept Development - I am a very big proponent of using community led design methods and or co-design methods when engaged in community design projects. That is because, when designing for community, I believe the role of the designer should shift to that of a facilitator of community vision rather than that of a passive researcher, observer, or expert. It would have been great to facilitate a series of co-design workshops throughout the project to actively interact with and receive feedback from community members to ensure that the solutions we put forward were solutions that the community connected with and wanted.
Further Concept Development - Because project time was limited and we moved forward with three spatial design concepts, our focus for the last leg of the project shifted from further concept development to understanding how all three concepts might exist cohesively in the space. Because of this shift we did not have time to further develop the concept we called the Hub, which was a space for entrepreneurs to be intentional about building relationships with each other, collaborating, sharing knowledge, and problem solving in order to grow their businesses. I realize that it may be difficult for Boxville to translate the concept into a physical reality without further exploration into the types of activities, tools, and spatial planning that might best move them toward the goals of the concept.