A few weeks ago we led a youth and community engagement event for our clients, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and the City of Austin, Texas. For the event, we deployed our patented chocolate cake master planning process to best engage the community’s youth and their families, and put their local insights and ideas at the forefront of the park redesign process.
Of course we have a special attachment to our first cake that was designed to help stimulate a general rethinking of how to engage citizens of Austin in the redesign of Waller Creek. Using chocolate cake to help Echoing Green‘s social entrepreneurs to diagram, explain, and draw out import insights from the process of starting a social venture was really effective but not in the least bit pretty. Last fall’s chocolate cake master planning event to with our friends at CURA and McGill University, focusing on upcoming changes around the Vendome Metro Station, set a cake record for the number of people engaged and general community attention.
All that being said, we think the Holly Shores chocolate cake sets a new benchmark for shear beauty. How did we get there? After Montreal, we took a step back and looked critically at how people were building with cake and each other; our level of engagement in the creative process; the collection of building materials (candy) at hand; and the end result. In short, although by our design a cake master plan cannot be perfect, it needs to look just awesome enough if it is going to truly have impact and in Montreal the end result was a bit lacking. For our latest cake in Austin, we added new material and process constraints; choreographed the process in a different fashion; and generally tweaked the entire building process to maximize opportunities for community story telling and generating unique insights about the park, and its users.
Posted on September 9th, 2012 at 11:55 am by publicworkshop in Our Work