Categories: graduate school, learning, process

For our service learning project in our design-studio course, my team is working with the City of Bloomington to help formulate some ideas and long-term solutions to increase the activity in the downtown area.

A few weeks ago we interviewed the Executive Director of the Bloomington Area Arts Council to get more details of the problem and some background on their past attempts to increase visitor activity specifically in the Bloomington Entertainment & Arts District. She stated that the reason downtown is not developing economically as fast as they would like it to is because of these reasons:

1. Parking: The parking structures are poorly managed. Common in most downtown areas, parking is limited. Since most of these parking structures are near businesses, about 60% of residents and visitors thought its solely reserved for employee parking. Also there is no indication of how many parking spots are available near the entrances. Drivers do not like to waste time. They feel they save more time driving around the streets than to drive in the parking structures and later discover the parking lot is full.
2. Shopping: Downtown businesses are competing with larger stores and restaurants like Target, Best Buy, and Applebees on the other side of town. Being a college student and not a native of Bloomington, it was apparent that the downtown shopping areas did not cater to the college community. Most of the stores downtown were filled with older women clothing and tailored to customers who have a lot of disposable income.
3. Wayfinding: New way finding signs do not seem effective. These brown signs were posted throughout the city the past few years. I know for from a visitors perspective when I first arrived in Bloomington, I didn’t even pay attention to those signs. They didn’t appear prominent enough for me to notice. My technique of wayfinding around downtown was to ask the closest person next to me hoping they could point me in the right direction.

By the end of the interview, she seemed to reiterate that parking was the main issue.

Our team discussed the responses and statements in the interview and we were skeptical that parking is the root of the problem. We all agreed to do some additional research to find out people’s perceptions of the area and what attracts/deters them to downtown.

Next we began brainstorming on how to collect this information and we felt design probes in parallel with contextual inquiry and surveys were the best methods to use. However, there was one slight problem. None of us has ever conducted an extensive design probe. However, we all were excited to learn and apply a new design method.

These past couple of days I’ve been reading up on cultural probes and found some excellent literature by Bill Gaver. Bill Gaver used cultural probes in looking at interaction techniques to increase the presence of elderly in their local communities. After reading more about cultural probes, I thought it was a good way to understand the cultural implications of our designs and open new spaces for design. We also plan to talk to other students and professors who used cultural or any design probes in their research.