Design Sprints

Ongoing

Design Sprints: Fall 2024

Design Sprints is Van Alen Institute’s newest community-led design program. Over eight weeks, five teams of community leaders and designers closely collaborated to create visual identities, wayfinding systems, and advocacy campaigns that activate public spaces and create more interconnected neighborhoods.

Our community partners wake up every day with an unwavering commitment to bringing about positive change. They advocate for street vendors across the city, restore public spaces that connect communities, give their neighbors a safe place to gather and exercise, engage youth in urban farming practices, and so much more.

Their design partners started by actively listening to the community partners, learning about their missions, causes, and needs. Before any designs were implemented, they had real conversations about how they could best mobilize their skills to help their partners meet those goals.

We’re so grateful for our teams’ time, wisdom, and dedication, and our network of supporters who make this work possible. Scroll down to learn more about each team and the results of their collaborations.

Operating along Queens’ 34th Avenue between 69th St and Junction Blvd, 34th Street Open Streets Coalition facilitates an outdoor community center and micro mobility corridor along 26 blocks in Jackson Heights. They partnered with WXY Studio to rethink how residents navigate this transformed streetscape.

The local community actively uses 34th Avenue for walking, running, and biking, and the team sought to encourage even more physical activity. However, they faced the unique challenge of creating clear wayfinding in a community that speaks 167 different languages.

The resulting system grew from the idea that color can transcend language barriers. The design moves beyond traditional signage conventions and uses a gradient system that turns a recreational loop into an intuitive journey. Runners, walkers, and residents follow a spectrum of colors that mark their progress through the neighborhood. Each hue corresponds to a specific route segment and shows pedestrians their progress. Once the loop is complete, pedestrians have traversed the entire gradient. The team also integrated augmented reality features into the wayfinding system, layering a digital dimension to the street experience that enhances accessibility and the overall experience.

The result is a wayfinding solution that serves its community at multiple levels — guiding movement, celebrating diversity, and embracing technological innovation without sacrificing its core goal of guiding people of all backgrounds through their neighborhood spaces.

Gotham Park is the nonprofit grassroots organization reopening, revitalizing and reactivating the forgotten spaces under the Manhattan side of the iconic Brooklyn Bridge. They collaborated with Pentagram and emerging designer Shawn Scott to create a comprehensive rebrand.

Through site visits, team meetings and research, Pentagram developed a deep understanding of Gotham Park’s mission and impact. The team’s goal was to create a brand identity that would resonate with diverse stakeholders — Gotham Park is establishing a new hyper-urban public space that is inclusive and welcoming to all. Situated in one of New York City’s densest areas at the crossroads of Chinatown, the Historic South Street Seaport, Two Bridges, the Financial District and TriBeCa, it is anchored by the 140-year-old Brooklyn Bridge and includes the Brooklyn Banks, a mecca for skateboarders and urban culture since the 1980s.

The rebrand begins with a custom typeface inspired by the historic granite arches and iconic red bricks that define Gotham Park. The bold and bright new logo captures the dramatic artisanry of the historic bridge masonry and NYC’s unique urban culture. The impactful and timeless logo can resonate with the many ways Gotham Park’s stakeholders view and value this important place, and the flexible typeface lends itself to myriad applications from signage to digital presence to merchandise.

A nonprofit organization that maintains gardens, green spaces, and weekly farmers market, James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center (JBOLC) fosters a multigenerational and inclusive community through shared love, respect, and appreciation for the beauty and generosity of nature. Together with BD Feliz, they sought to reflect their vitality and progress in a refreshed digital presence, and celebrate their story and history — to reveal their roots.

Together, they designed and developed a mobile-friendly website with a colorful, garden-inspired palette, custom floral patterns, and an interactive timeline that traces JBOLC’s rich history. This timeline, which JBOLC can easily update, helps tell the story of the events and milestones that have shaped their mission.

With the Design Sprints timeline limited to eight weeks, BD Feliz prioritized building a site JBOLC will continue to refine, launching fully next year. To support this, BD Feliz provided training that equips their team to manage and update the site independently. JBOLC’s guidance and vision drove the project, ensuring the site would bridge the gap between their outdoor programs and online engagement. This partnership has delivered a sustainable, user-centered website that will grow alongside JBOLC’s mission to foster an interconnected and empowered garden community.

Red Hook Farms is a youth-centered urban farm working to bring food justice to the community of Red Hook. They steward two farms in the neighborhood — the Wolcott Street Farm on NYCHA land, and the Columbia Street Farm on NYC Parks land. These spaces are verdant oases in the neighborhood, growing over 20,000 pounds of fruit and vegetables annually. They also host school workshops and are public park spaces with a diverse ecology and opportunities for passive education, exploration, and relaxation. 

In collaboration with Studio Loutsis, they designed a robust signage and wayfinding system for the Columbia Street Farm. This will increase the public’s ability to navigate the space, allow the farmers to better track crops, and improve street-facing signage in order to encourage members of the public to visit the farm.

Signage will be fabricated and installed in Winter 2024/25, and the team is confident it will greatly improve the experience and accessibility for all who visit the farm.

How do you expand an organization’s capacity to build power and support for and among its members?

For Street Vendor Project (SVP) — a membership-based collective of 3,000+ champions of street vendor rights — this calls for raising awareness and understanding with all of their audiences. Dominant narratives and public misinformation fail to reflect the individuality of street vendors or their positive economic contributions to NYC.

ThoughtMatter and SVP worked together to develop a new design identity to drive public awareness of their mission and goal of uplifting street vendors who play a valuable and prominent role in many of New York City’s most recognizable public spaces. To help SVP build recognition and extend their reach, ThoughtMatter created a brand toolkit that will consistently reflect the organization’s presence and work in NYC through a unified visual system and messaging framework.

The team identified the key elements of who SVP is and what they value, then crafted a hero emblem supported by updated colors, fonts, and a series of icons. The resulting toolkit has since been used to create communication assets in support of the organization’s current and future needs.