ArtHERE Civic Revitalization Platform | ZERO1 Biennial, Lower East Side B.I.D.

Challenge:

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, cities were left under-resourced. A surge of civic innovation arose, often in the forms of guerilla and tactical projects where people took the state of their communities in their own hands. ArtHERE arose out of a vision to address the blight affecting San Francisco. The platform’s mission was to experiment with the use of physical spaces and creative interventions as a form of community decision making, as well as a tool for creative reallocation of resources.

Approach:

Preliminary informal ‘hallway interviews’ with community members and secondary research on how crowdsourcing and placemaking informed the preliminary concept. Taking a lean approach, we built a working prototype to conduct desirability testing with target users.

We targeted users by identifying personas: the engaged community member, the property managers, and the city representative, then sketched out various user journeys using paper prototypes and wireframes. Because we wanted this to be about community involvement, we included the social elements of voting on ideas.

In our engagement and informal interviews with potential partners, users and collaborators, we found there were a number of challenges and opportunities that we had not considered in the first iterative sprint. Placing art in physical spaces can physically alter a building or infrastructure, it may or may not need maintenance over time (depending on the life of the installation), and at times may require permits. On the other hand, many of these challenges had already been addressed by the opportunity that arose to work with arts institutions as a platform to streamline their open calls. Therefore, we expanded our personas to include arts organizations conducting open calls, and we further ideated the open call process and user experience for this new use case.

Result:

ArtHERE facilitated community-driven urban revitalization through the connecting of spaces and art. Working across the united states with ZERO1, the Lower East Side Business Improvement District (New York City), and University of California at Santa Cruz, and the platform ultimately served two primary use cases:

Offer a replicable platform and model for community engagement to empower community members to initiate and contribute to tactical urbanism and placemaking projects that improve their neighborhoods. The platform was used from Santa Cruz, California to New York City, New York.
Streamline the submission of responses in calls for artists or art. Both the Lower East Side Business Improvement District and ZERO1 Biennial used the platform for their open calls

ArtHERE received grant funding from The National Endowment for the Arts’ Art Works program and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, was recognized at a Commonwealth Club event with Mayoral candidates, and was featured in Fast Co:Exist. As a passion project, ArtHERE was taken down four years after its conception.