Placemaking Week 2024

ChalkTalk is a human-centered design methodology aimed at fostering better collaboration between communities and government and envisioning more resilient public spaces in the built environment. While contemporary practices of gaining public input can help to disseminate information they often fall short of achieving equitable participation and engagement from the public. Borrowing from critical practitioners in urban planning, ChalkTalk reimagines the design thinking phases of inspiration, ideation, and implementation as public life studies, participatory democracy, and tactical urbanism respectively. By using the ChalkTalk methodology, designers, residents, and planning professionals alike can collaborate and innovate on evolving infrastructure patterns, and lay the groundwork for better participatory design practice. In this interactive workshop, participants will take part in each stage of the ChalkTalk methodology through a companion booklet. A brief overview of the booklet and examples case studies will kick off the workshop, then participants will head outside to conduct a 20-minute public life study on the streets and sidewalks in Baltimore (near the conference location). The session will then focus on collaboratively abstracting the observation data into opportunities for innovative ideas, and then there will be time for prototyping these ideas by way of tactical urbanism (most likely using Legos and duct tape).