In 1942, Japanese American (JA) families across the western US were forced from their homes and incarcerated in American concentration camps, transforming both these families and the communities which they were forced to leave behind.
“When we came back, we somehow got back on our feet,
but... it was a different community we returned to.”
- JA community member
This project is in partnership with a JA community in Western Washington. I played a lead role in community engagement, theme discovery and development, concept development, and user experience design for a permanent public installation that commemorates Japanese American heritage. The project is located at a public trail, light rail station, and bridge crossing, at a site of historical importance to this community.
What makes this project unique is its participatory nature, with community voices guiding the design at each stage.
The primary voices in this exhibit design needed to come from the JA community and JA artists. Our first challenge was to facilitate understanding of the problem space, and to encourage creativity and idea exchange in a facilitated design session.
How might we engage members of the JA community to imagine what form an installation might take, working within the opportunities and constraints available at the site?
Community partners organized the logistics for a six-hour meeting of over 20 participants. I co-facilitated the session. The community group chose to divide participants into groups comprised of a community member, an artist, a designer, and a city or county staff person. We briefed the groups about the project and invited them to ideate on solutions. I filmed each group discussing their work and created a highlight reel that we played at a subsequent design session.
I also led an exercise to discover and gain consensus on the key messages the community wanted to communicate. I had deployed an online survey before the session to gain insights about what community members thought the main message of the exhibits should be.
I collaborated again with community members on the format for a second working session to iterate on ideas and content gathered at the first session.
How might the community groups move from ideas to proto-design concepts?
The focus of this session was coming to a shared understanding of what a visitor's journey to the site would look like.
We seeded small groups with collage materials that included snippets of the ideas, imagery, and sketches gleaned from the first design session. Groups worked with and expanded upon these ideas on a physical plan of the site. The participants presented and described their collages in terms of their main message, visitor experience, central themes, and artistic concepts.
I gathered all the findings, artifacts, videos, collages, and main messages together and synthesized these into loose design concepts for the community group to respond to. They selected a design direction from the three concepts I presented. Then, I led a collaborative session with our internal design team to move from the broad concepts into low-fi design schemes.
I led our design team and developed visual designs. I also built relationships with other site designers already on the project—architects, landscape designers, project managers, and city and county staff—to ensure that our work fit seamlessly into the complex site plan and met the constraints of a public space.
We continually checked back with our JA stakeholders to ensure their vision still guided the course of the design.
One way we continued to engage the community is by including Japanese American visual artists and a writer. I created an artist's call to select the artists and managed the process to the satisfaction of the JA community stakeholders. Our team worked directly with these contributors to ensure that their vision was integrated into the site design and met the needs of all City and County stakeholders.
Our design space includes a large plaza area, fence elements, and a mural spanning the length of the multi-modal bridge.
These elements are now installed in Bellevue, WA. Community members report that they feel a sense of accomplishment and pride that their heritage is celebrated in this vibrant, public venue.
I will be adding to my site throughout 2021. Please check back often for updates.
