People Make Parks
Planning for playing.
People Make Parks was borne out of the belief that public parks are better utilized when they reflect the needs and wants of its patrons. The initiative, created by Hester Street Collaborative and NYC’s Partnership for Parks, strives to make the capital improvement process, often confusing and replete with red tape, more accessible and understandable for local communities to engage in the process for designing and building their parks.
Objective Subject created a digital platform that empowers users seeking information, and offers inspiration and tools to engage the area park communities, and ultimately becomes the keystone of this important project.
Tools Page
From the outset, our aim was to attract new visitors by customizing information most relevant to them: their local park, where they are most likely to become involved. We devised an automated “park finder,” whereby entering a local ZIP code generates a list of relevant parks, complete with capital improvement initiatives and different ways to get involved.
Park Finder
The platform further emphasizes this call to action with a toolkit showing visitors the 8 step process of getting involved, past success stories and user tools for gathering community input.
Steps Page
“Because parks are critical to immigrants, who often rely on parks as oases in the city, our tools are visual rather than verbal, to ensure everyone can participate.”
— Dylan House, Community Design Director at Hester Street Collective
The launch event, part of NYC’s first Urban Design Week, allowed everyone from early backers to community organizers and contributors, to celebrate the official inauguration of the People Make Parks program. We created posters of our custom illustrations from the online park finder that highlighted the different types of facilities for the occasion.
Posters
The website has been widely praised as intuitive and easily accessible to the broad swath of NYC’s diverse population. It is currently being translated into Spanish and Mandarin.
