Type: Public Workshop Series
Size: 100+ attendees
Status: Complete
The Market Street Prototyping Festival is an initiative led by the San Francisco Planning Department in partnership with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The Festival invites designers and everyday residents to submit proposals for “prototypes” that serve as pilots for physical improvements along Market Street.
The Spring 2015 Festival transformed Market Street into a public platform showcasing roughly 50 of the most exceptional ideas for improving the corridor. The Planning Department hired Street Plans to design activities for two public involvement events as part of the early stages of the Festival. For the first event, Street Plans created activities for a public open house, held at Freespace – a free experimental art space on Market Street. This event was designed to engage a broad audience in thinking about short and long-term solutions that would improve the Market Street corridor. The feedback gathered at the open house helped frame the design assignment for teams creating proposals.
The second event was an Idea Lab, hosted at the Autodesk Gallery. The Idea Lab brought design teams together with residents, business owners and other stakeholders. Street Plans created activities for the Idea Lab that allowed attendees to work together to get familiar with the issues stakeholders identified on the corridor, and brainstorm early-stage prototypes. Street Plans also created a framework for fostering ongoing partnerships among attendees. For this activity, attendees were asked to share their contact information and any skills or resources they were willing to devote to a prototyping project, creating a “Collaboration Directory”.
For the 2016 Festival, Street Plans worked with YBCA and SF Planning to lead a series of smaller Idea Labs with non-profit leaders in the Central Market district. These events resulted in a list of recommendations for anyone creating a proposal for the district, and helped the group create their own community prototype for inclusion in the Festival.
Photo by Jacqwi Campbell.