It’s been in the works for a couple of months now but it’s now official, Public Workshop will be working with fifteen Chicago teenagers starting in late June of this summer to design-build food carts for a local community organization. Actually, we should clarify that they may not actually end up being food carts, depending on the exact needs of our client and quite frankly it probably won’t look like the gem of a trailer pictured above. It could look like this, minus the roasted lizard or rodent on the left:
It may even be a unique fruit and vegetable storage system for a community bodega that typically doesn’t carry such things. However, you can be sure that it will be some sort of built implement that improves the distribution of healthy food for our yet-to-be-made public community partner. We are particularly excited about this project because the end result will not be a prototype, but a durable, functional and 100% awesome product product created, and largely built by local youth. Quite frankly there are few precedents for this as even college students and young, community-minded design professionals struggle with making similar types of usable projects for their clients.
We are very excited to have the opportunity this summer to use our considerable experience to entirely reframe people’s conception of what’s possible when we meaningfully engage youth and the community in such projects.
A very special thank you to the crew at After School Matters (here) and Krisann Rehbein at the Chicago Architecture Foundation (here) for making this project possible.
Posted on April 19th, 2010 at 5:22 pm by publicworkshop in News