Community Design

I could write about patterns, sectors, or zones. Or how to start a design. We learned about all of this during our second week in the Urban PDC. But that’s all rather technical and I don’t want to capture the class material here – for that you better take the course… I want to apply what I learned. Throughout the course, I will be involved in a city repair project. This will leverage the experience from an organization in Portland, Oregon. I am excited about being involved in the infancy of City Repair SF but I don’t want to write about that either. I would like to apply what I am learning in this course to a topic that I am exploring: Community building. In particular: Can we design a community in a way that counteracts stereotypes?

The first step in the design process is visioning. This can take the form of a brainstorm. There are some new tools I learned about: Mindmaps. I haven’t really explored them in depth yet but instead started playing with one of the software programs out there. I am not convinced that this isn’t just a fancy way to do brainstorming but we’ll see. The first thing I did, was to draw a community mindmap. What do I associate with a community that counteracts stereotypes?

Here is the map I came up with:

I have no idea if this is a valid mindmap because it’s not really representing a conceptual design. It’s basically ordering more or less what I associate with a healthy community, a community designed to counteract stereotypes.

I am finding the mindmap approach useful, though, to organize information. Here is a first approach to organizing my conceptualization of stereotypes as belief packages.

I am not sure if I will leave it this way but for now, it captures the most important aspects. This also shows a limitation of mindmaps: As much as they claim to avoid linear thinking, they still don’t let us capture the interconnections. For example, while scaffolding is nonconceptual and thus feeds into aliefs, aliefs are not just nonconceptual. And most of the mental states are stored in Thomason’s modules, not just the content. And actually all the mental states involved have content. But it helps me organize the ideas. This mindmap might not do it in the best way but it’s a start for conceptualizing belief packages visually.