South Dunedin suburban branding, and local bird hunt.
The Dunedin City Council urban planning team provided the brief for Interaction Design students in 2011, with the broad aim of enabling business and community development in the main retail centre of South Dunedin, a once industry-focused and now economically depressed suburb in this small city. The student results were so successful that students were encouraged to develop and deploy some of these concepts, through internships with the Otago Institute of Design and in partnership with community organisations.
Student designers engaged in three types of research: field research through User Observations, social history research through the University’s Hocken Collection: Archive and Manuscripts, and community engagement through conversations at an open day held in an empty shop, and subsequent relationships with individuals and community organisations. The students presented their research through the design of urban experiences. Don Norman (2004) suggests that “Experience design, perhaps more than other forms of design, is transactive and transformative: every experience designer is an experiencer; and every experiencer, via his or her reactions, a designer of experience in turn.” The student designers sought a particular kind of understanding, with which to form a praxis, an active process through which a theory is enacted, practiced, embodied, or realized through the creative process of designing. In this case the understanding surrounding a particular place, its social histories, and communities, is transformed.
This project was presented at the 4th International Urban Design conference in Queensland.