DRS2012 Bangkok Proceedings Vol 4 - Design Research Society

1682 Conference Proceedings
Neighborhood Labs – Community building through knowledge transfer
Figure 2: Message board set up at the Kreativhaus
Drawing from this experience, the co-design partners decided to centralize this specific
interest as the overarching subject of knowledge transfer, in order to stimulate social
interaction and to improve the general communicative situation on the island. The
articulated need for providing the community with ways, space and tools to gather and
exchange concerns and ideas about the district became an essential goal.
We expanded the blackboard intervention by providing stickers with questions like
“Neighborhood means …”, “The Fischerkiez is …”, “I want … for my neighborhood” and
so on, provoking inhabitants to reflect on their living environment, and to share their ideas
and perspectives.
Figure 3: Sticker message board as intervention.
In addition to the described interventions which aim at gaining a better understanding of
the building and maintaining of acceptance for the project in the community we are
working with, we proposed to the partners more experimental, playful concepts of
intervening. These conceptual prototypes include the “idea machine”, an easy-to-use
apparatus which hands you a random idea for the improvement of the area on a printed
note after you entered the idea yourself, and “Wormholes”, a basic mechanism that
allows people to communicate across the neighborhood in real time or through record &
play-functions, without their users knowing with whom they are actually communicating.