2012
Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership

The Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership are challenged with making a sparse Downtown into a thriving place day and night. In Spring 2012, we ran a 15 week studio with final year designers to explore and develop a range of services that could exist in 10 years time, to help them think about the kinds of things that could be possible that they might start to develop now. They took on a lot of new approaches – first future scenario making, using materials and existing research such as The Institute for the Future, and learned to extrapolate their thinking into the future. We then took them through service thinking and design. Finally we explored the kinds of technology and pervasive computing that will allow them to create evidence and artefacts of whole new services which cannot exist right now.

Ideas included new ways of thinking about education, as an exchange of skills, new homes on the water, new means to track and interact with news, different forms of citizen engagement.

“It was great to have students tackle some of the challenges we experience in creating interesting and engaging space Downtown. Their unique insight challenges norms and encouraged is to push boundaries in our thinking of creating space for future generations. ”
Jeremy Waldrup, Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership

The photo above is from the final critique, where 3 members of Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership came and explored the ideas developed with invited guests and CMU faculty.