Tools and Guides for Community Design
Tools and Guides for Community Design
Are you ready to engage your community with activities to build momentum toward design goals?
Is your community interested in collecting thoughts/feedback about your community’s spatial planning or design needs/visions from residents and/or visitors? The activities shared here can be utilized by communities to collect ideas, thoughts, or visions for your community design projects.
SPARK! Extension Toolkit for Creative Placemaking
This publication, SPARK! Extension Creative Placemaking Toolkit, provides thirteen activities that Extension professionals can use to integrate creative placemaking efforts in extension programming. The activities can be offered alone or in sequence with other activities shared in the toolkit as part of creative placemaking endeavors in communities.
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How-To-Guide | Youth Design Camp
Community Design partnered with the R.L. Brown Foundation to host a week-long design camp for youth in Sharpsburg, Kentucky in 2023. The Youth Design Camp fostered a sense of pride and unity among residents of Sharpsburg, transforming once overlooked streets into vibrant communal spaces. We documented our process in this how-to guide.
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Activity Guide | Universal Playground
This activity introduces the 7 principles of universal design. Universal design is the design of buildings, products, or environments to make them accessible to all people, regardless of age, disability, or other factors. Students will create a new playground space that incorporates universal design principles.
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Activity Guide | Community Mural
This activity encourages students to get youth thinking about how murals can be used to convey a message, help build community, and be a source of pride. This activity will rely on the combined efforts of a group to create a large scale community mural.
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Activity Guide | Where Your Sidewalk Begins
This activity encourages students to consider their neighborhood and what elements make them feel safe or welcome. They will read a poem, discuss its meaning, complete a worksheet, and reimagine their own place "where the sidewalk ends."
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Activity Guide | Community Collage
This activity is intended to get youth thinking about ways they can be actively involved in transforming their community. Students will participate in a photo-walking tour, complete a think sheet, and create a collage.
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Activity Guide | Sidewalk Subway
The Sidewalk Subway is a place making project that welcomes people to explore the unique character of downtown following the phased reopening of businesses due to COVID-19. Inspired by subway and metro maps from cities across the world, this project interprets the walking tour routes into subway lines with color coded markings on the downtown sidewalks, including ‘stops’ at destinations.
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Activity Guide | Downtown Bracket Challenge
The Downtown Bracket Challenge is a placemaking project that allows people to vote on a project they would like to see installed in their community. Voting is done through donations, supporting local needs while providing a tangible way to count votes. The winning project can be installed in the community, resulting in a project that people can see and experience.
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Activity Guide | Chalk and Talk
The ‘Chalk and Talk’ program seeks to engage people in a creative and accessible way about their feelings, thoughts and views on their city’s downtown. In essence it is a way to informally gather and summarize the varying views and experiences of attendees of local festivals and events about the city while they are immersed in it. The intent is for this information to inspire dialogue and help inform the preliminary steps taken towards longer term design, planning and revitalization initiatives.
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Activity Guide | Radical Walking Toolkit
Radical Walking is a process for recapturing our understanding of everyday spaces through slow walking. Radical Walking is an engagement process and a tool to entice individuals to examine their surroundings. This toolkit provides a youth-focused example of guiding questions, activities and a survey questionnaire that can be utilized to help youth observe, interpret, and voice their ideas for vibrant communities. It can also be used by community leaders to enliven engagement in community and economic development efforts in more creative and holistic ways.
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How-To Guide | Create a Basemap in Inkscape
This document will provide a detailed walk-through on how to use Inkscape. Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor; it can be used to create a basemap that can be used for planning purposes.
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