Matthew Greenwald

Fall 2011 - Summer 2012

This project began with a simple idea. What if students were given real world design opportunities and more control over the process? And what if the design came from a place of passion rather than by mandate or curriculum? Tory Menchaca and I began meeting in the university lounge and library during free time—brainstorming and exploring ideas around these two questions.

We started from a place of passion for me, nature play for children. Having grown up near the woods in Virginia I knew how positive the experience could be for kids to have unregulated and un-curated playtime in natural spaces. We set out to inventory the city for places that could become nature play areas. I am always looking for excuses to fire up ArcMap anyways, so I visited the city GIS department and explained what we were up to. They surprised us, saying that such an inventory was already underway.

We then met with Sam Assefa to get some guidance on how to proceed. Sam is an extremely helpful and friendly city planner I had met during a prior semester. Sam said there was a five year master plan underway that included the Parks and Recreation inventory. He suggested we reach out to Keith Walzak at the Parks Department to learn more. We met with Keith and Jeff Haley soon after Thanksgiving. I was inspired by how receptive the City of Boulder seemed to be with collaborative projects with the University. Jeff Haley took us under his wing and coached us on what Superintendent Jeff Dillon would want to see from us in order to succeed. We did a dry run of our presentation to Jeff Haley and made some tweeks. Then we set a date to present to Jeff Dillon on March 8th 2012.

Meanwhile Tory had been building support for our efforts. We were now backed by AmeriCorp, Children Youth, and Environment (CYE), and a few professors and instructors from our Environmental Design Department. Professor Charlie Chase had become a very important mentor during this effort. It wouldn’t have been possible without the buy in from Brian Cook, who was willing to help lead the classes that would be created.

We presented to Jeff Dillon on March 8th 2012 and he accepted our proposal. Below is the work from the project during Zach Kiernan and I's time interning for Parks and Recreation.

News:

1. Mesa Memorial Park was renamed to Bill Bower Park on August 22nd, 2014.
2. Bill Bower Park opened October 7th, 2014.

This is the presentation I gave to the Parks Department on March 8th, 2012.

Below are various elements from the project.

This was a board assembled by my project partner Zachary Kiernan to present to the community during the workshops.

This was a board assembled by my project partner Zachary Kiernan. It shows some shots of the big workshop we held at Bear Creek Elementary.

This is an example of the May 9th design charette we did with the community. It was a lot of fun and it really drove the process during the remainder of the project.

This is some actual sample data that we pulled from the workshop boards shown above.

This was my first attempt at condensing and making sense of the data we got out of the workshops.

This was my second attempt at the information matrix. This one improved on the first by dividing up the options into Actions, Objects, and Opinions. This helped tease out more nuance. I still think this could be improved on.

A survey was released in June after the workshop to help further hone our triangulation as well as to make sure we were on the right track.

This is the final plan we presented to the community.