Rural Placemaking Studio

Description of the video:

Yeah. So we'll just get started by introducing ourselves real quick, from the rural placemaking studio team. I'm Nicole Vasconi. I'm with the Center for Rural Engagement, and I'm their quality of place liaison. And I'm really excited to be talking with you all today. I'll hand it up to Jon. Hi everybody, thanks for coming. My name is Jon. I am a faculty member at the Eskinazi School of Art, Architecture and Design. I'm an architect by training. Yeah, I'm also the director of Serve Design, which is going to be a big part of this effort. Sara, you want to introduce yourself? Yeah. Hello. My name is Sara Marshall. I am a graduate student in the Arts Administration program at IU. I am the Rural Placemaking Fellow. So I'll be working with Nicole and everyone for this project. Yeah. All right. Well, I'll go ahead and share my screen so we can get started with the Powerpoint for you. Basically what we'll go over today, I'll give a brief introduction about the CRE and talk about some of the projects we've done in the past for those who may not be as familiar with us. Then Jon, we'll talk a little bit about Design Center and some of the past projects we've done together. And then we'll talk about upcoming opportunities for the rural place making studio. Then we'll definitely have time for questions at the end and for some discussion. When you have questions you can feel free to ask us. Then we'll save about 20 minutes for that. At least we'd love to know where you're calling in from your name, maybe which community you're working for representing, maybe any relevant organization. All right. This is, as I mentioned before, I am the Quality of Place Liaison with the Center for Rural Engagement. The Rural Place Making Studio is a new initiative that we're launching and rolling out this year that we hope will be an annual program. But it's definitely based on precedent and on previous projects that we have done together with community partners in the surrounding area. And also with Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design. And specifically served Design Center a little bit about the Center for Rural Engagement. We started up in about 20:18 were initiated or launched by a very generous grant from the Lily Endowment, which we've graduated from since about the end of 2022. We're officially part of the university now and have been integrated into the university. We're still working in a lot of the areas we had been in before and working towards building a replical model of rural engagement with student engagement and learning at the center, while also prioritizing community initiated projects. We also work in several different areas of the quality of place liaison. We also have liaisons that work in community health and community resilience. To that end, we have a variety of projects that span a lot of different disciplines that are found across the university and are represented in different schools. These are just some examples in some of the areas that we've worked in. Quality of place refers to like arts and culture, education, also housing and housing affordability. This map you can actually find on our website, rural Indiana. And it's interactive, which is why I pointed out. You can go to that part of our website. I think it's under reports or information visualizations. You can hover your mouse over these different counties and read more about some of the projects we've done over the past five years or so. I think since this map has been published, it's updated. But I think even since then we've been continuing to work in other counties across the state. Do you want to jump in a little bit about serve design here? Sure, Surf design, it's more of a clinic center is a bit of a misnomer. I think it was started in about the same time that the Center for Rural Engagement was started. We do a bunch of things. We try to get grants to support other faculty in art and design who want to be doing projects out in the community. We will bring speakers to campus. We've done connected to housing. This conversation is really about placemaking. But if you have other conversations about housing, I'm happy to chat with you. We've done other projects about placemaking which we'll talk about in a second. But essentially, I think the way to think about serve design is that connection point between university students, faculty resources, and communities in Indiana. Yeah, we've been mentioning this idea of quality of place. What exactly do we mean by quality of place? I thought this might be just a good question to cover and we can definitely talk about this more. As Jon was with the Serve Design Center, it's addressing projects ideas and creating opportunities for communities by designs in the physical environment that can include buildings and public spaces that people can access cultural activities and recreational opportunities. Really, the goal of quality of place is to make a better quality of life for everybody through arts and cultural activities very specifically. But also just having people have a sense of pride about where they live or creating more opportunity that will attract people to move to an area and to establish routes there potentially. And have that sense of social cohesion through arts and culture. And utilizing and revitalizing public spaces. And having shared in common goals as a community. We've also mentioned creative placemaking a couple times. The way that we're approaching creative placemaking, the way we think about it is it's economic development and community development that puts art and culture and cultural heritage at the center is a mechanism for strengthening communities and creating new possibilities by putting the arts at the center of that. This can be community arts or community art initiatives, visual arts, performing arts. I think the sky is the limit here. I think what's really special about creative placemaking with its role and development, is that it really helps show how unique your community is, show off personality, and can show the rest of the region or the rest of the state or area just what you have to offer in terms of your unique assets. And that's what we build upon in this program about the rural place making studio more specifically over the applicant eligibility. Just real briefly, this is open for rural Indiana communities. And we're working off the USDA definition of rural, which is basically 50,000 people or less within a community that's in a non urban, non metro, more rural area. Ideally, we're looking for communities that were located within about 2 hours of a drive from Bloomington. Since we will be working with students and sending students out into communities, we want to make sure that they're not spending a ton of time on the road, that it's going to be easy to get to. We are looking for organizations that have some nonprofit designation. We'll get into that a little bit later as to why that's going to be helpful. But basically, it will help ensure that there will be an organization that can receive charitable gifts and donations for your project. We're also asking in your application that you indicate main project ideas and be specific about that. We'll get into that a little bit more later. But also talk about who will be your project manager, what's their role in the community, What's their relationship to the project and the idea, and to the community at large? Jon, do you want to go over some of our program goals? Sure. What we're trying to do is build off some of the work that we've done in the past and maybe expand some of those services a little bit. We are trying to come up with a menu of services that we can provide. This is mostly to get everyone on the same page in terms of what we can do. Probably I wouldn't necessarily just limit yourself to this list. There are some opportunities to do something a little bit beyond, but just talk to us. Just let us know what you're thinking and we're happy to let you know if it's possible or not. But some of the things that we can do range from architectural, if there's an old building in your community, we can help get that ready for a grant application or capital campaign. We can do some schematic design. We can do an assessment of where it is we are not professionals. I want to be very clear about that. Faculty and students, we're trying to take the place of architectural or structural engineer out in the community. Instead, trying to start the momentum on some projects. There are other That we can do related to public art installations that could be murals, that could be sculptures. Coming up with schematic designs for re, envisioning a plaza or a parking lot, or a space like that. We can work on signage. For the most part. Our services are going to be limited to design work. We can try to help you connect with professionals who might be able to take that early design work into the next level. But that will be on a case by case basis. So I'll talk a bit more about some of the projects that we've done in the past. This is a project that we did down in Salem on Lake Salinda. We worked with the architecture program here at Eskinazi. This particular design was inspired by quilting. You can see that in some of the acrylic work there. That brings up an important part about what we're doing to Cole mention this, but what we're trying to do is find what's unique about your community and augment that, make that stand out, Make that known to people who are passing by who are visiting the community. That is a strong part of what we're trying to do and that involves you. It's not coming down to your community and imposing some artwork on a park like this. Instead, it's conversations that we have with you about what you want to see, what you want to do, and then how do we make that a reality. I think this is a good example of that. There's a quote from Judy Jonson, She's the director of the Community Foundation down there. We've done some murals. The murals, the mural on the left was done by a faculty member with a couple of different graduate students. The project on the right was done entirely by one undergrad student who took that on as a capstone project. Again for both cases. The one on the left is about that was envisioned by primary school kids. They did the drawings, the faculty member and the IU students basically transferred that into stencils and then they painted that on the wall. The project on the right, the student really did almost the whole project. He worked with the city or the town of Holland and tried to understand what was special about Holland and what was the things that Holland wanted to tell people. And then he translated that into a design and did the painting. These are two different alley activations in Jasper. Both of these are right off of the main square. And Jasper, they've been doing a lot of work down there and they had these two alleyways that weren't doing very much. The one on the left was designed by a student and painted by, I think, a local artist that connects to the Astra Theater, which Jasper spent a lot of money renovating. Then the one on the right is a nod to the history of Jasper. All furniture has been a big part of the City of Jasper. Kimball Furniture actually started out as a piano company. The idea was, let's create a mural that reflects that history. This mural on the right has piano keys that crawl up the wall and do some fun things. That idea of connecting it to history or connecting it to important things in your community is a strong part of this creative place making. Just add real quick to with the alley on the right. There have been some updates to it even since this photo. There's a piano in there that you can play with. There's a class at the Ludi School of Informatics and Engineering that's working on installing sensors in the alley. When you walk down it, it'll make music sounds like you're stepping on piano keys. So I just wanted to add that real quick. All right. So now we're going to, I think, get into some of the possibilities of what we can do as a studio. As I mentioned before, we can measure and draft existing conditions on buildings. We can do murals. We can do asphalt painting projects. One thing about murals and asphalt painting projects, these are typically cheap interventions. Cheap projects. They can change the nature of a place. They, they can do that in a number of ways on the historical references that we just talked about. It also just shows that they care about what's happening in a place, in a community, and I know everyone on this call cares about their town and their city. These creative placemaking projects can help that there's this attitude within placemaking, which is lighter, cheaper, faster. The idea is not to spend a ton of money on placemaking projects, not sharing. If they're going to have much of a return. The idea is, can we do something that is quick and easy to implement and then see how people like it and tweak it if it needs to be tweaked. That's the philosophy that we would bring to a project. Let's go to the next couple slides and I'll explain a little bit more about some of the possibilities of what we can do. These are not necessarily, actually, this image here is a project that we're working on in North Vernon. What we're doing is we are measuring and creating existing drawings as built drawings of this building. That's going to be important for some grants that North Vernon is going to write in order to save this building. That's the first step on a project, is trying to understand and document what's happening, what's already there. And then from there, a structural engineer can come in and look and see if the building can be saved or what interventions need to be done. You can try to get the drawings out to a real tor. Our students can take those existing drawings and come up with different ideas and create renders great visualizations that again, can be used for grant applications or for capital campaigns. This is an example of a asphalt painting project, not necessarily one that we did, but you can see how it can take a, an awkward corner and make it a point of attention. Again, we can do visualizations. I was talking before about a building, but this can be done for parks and any project that you're interested in. Our students are quite good at interesting intriguing visualizations that will get, that you can use for grants and things, but also get people on board with some of the ideas. This is what's called a part design, taking parking space and transforming it into a little park. This is really very useful on main streets. We saw a lot of this during covid throughout the country, people transforming parking spaces into usable space. Now that can be done on a temporary basis, may be connected to some programming, or it can be done on a more permanent basis, like we see here. This project is really exciting to me. This is based on some work that was done in Cincinnati. Essentially, this organization, it's called Cosine. What they did was they got together all of the businesses on Main Street, in this one portion of Cincinnati. They all came up with new designs for their signage. Then all the signs were fabricated. It does a couple of things. It renews that business presence on the street, but also it unifies them in a certain way. You don't have a really nice sign next to someone whose signage hasn't changed in 25 years. We can do the design work. We might be able to do a little bit more in terms of some of the fabrication. Yeah, this is definitely a possibility for project these pop up spaces. This connects to alley activation. How do we take leftover spaces and transform them now, these can be done on a permanent basis or it can be done more on a temporary basis, like it's suggested here, a pop up space. There's a lot of possibilities here depending on the kind of spaces that you have. Okay. Yeah. I'll go over just real quick, the basic program timeline. Thanks so much, Jon, for walking us through all those examples and all that information. We're in the period of accepting applications. Our deadline for that is February 19. So if you can get your applications in by the end of day or midnight on the 19th, I should say, then we'll start reviewing them. We would like to have a couple communities selected, at least by the beginning of March. Then we'll work with you to we'll have some community planning sessions. Basically, I'll be there to help you plan some of those, but I would like to rely on the participants. You're the local expert, I want to know from you where's a good place to meet. What's a good time, who should be there? We can help you advertise that a little bit too, to make sure people know. Essentially, we'll meet and talk about what's special about your community, what's working really well when we have a sense of who we are working with over the summer. I also want to set up regular check in meetings. We'll have more time to talk about what exactly will go into a community planning session. I would anticipate maybe having one or two of those in your community that last maybe an hour, maybe a little more, but nothing too heavy. Then once we have a good sense of how your projects going to fit into your community, and what we will call asset mapping sessions. Have a sense of your local assets that will inform the design brief that will then pass off to Jon and his students. We'll coordinate some site visits and the predesign design work will happen over the summer. Then at the end of that, we'll have a period or a handoff. You'll have the deliverables in hand and we'd love to schedule some celebration, celebratory gathering where we can celebrate the success we've had so far. From there, I, I think there will be some really interesting opportunities to work together on technical assistance and project continuation, while by August you will have in hand some deliverable design. Maybe potentially, depending on the projects that we get and the resources, there might be some ability to fabricate or implement some of these projects like on the smaller scale with public art. After that though, we'll keep working with you to provide support and some consultation help address funding gaps, help you finalize some of those resources being there as educational resource but also technical assistance to make sure that there's a really solid maintenance plan moving forward. How the space or how the project is going to be maintained in your community and make it sustainable. We can talk more about that too, if you have questions in the Q and A. Yeah, applications are open. You can go to our website to look for the application. Here's my contact info. If you still have questions after we have time to chat at the end of this, my number as well. So feel free to say that you can reach out to me anytime if you have any questions. Okay. We had a question in the chat about interior projects. Interior projects are not off limits. It may depend on what you're trying to do, but we encourage you to definitely make a submission. We have, again, this list of things that we've done in the past, but we're open to some new ideas. I can't guarantee you we'll accept them, but we definitely want to hear what projects you have in mind. Other questions. We've got another one on the chat. I'll read it off real quick. My understanding is you provide help with the planning, but then we need to find funding for implementation. This is from Jenny. I can answer that real quick. Yes, that's correct. It's like the Pre work, the technical assistance with getting your ideas at first off the ground. But it is the communities, I guess we hope it's their goal or their responsibility to secure funding for their projects. However, we're here to still assist with that. That's actually going to be a big part of Sara Marshall's role as our rural placemaking fellow is helping source grants, make sure you know about opportunities, deadlines, strategies for applying. We also have had some really great conversations with community, or with our stakeholder partners at Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority and Patroniity, they have a great grant program called Creating Places. One way we can see help you get some of these projects off the ground and running by making sure you're in a really good place to start up like a patronsity profile, for example. And you can read more about that grant program on their website. Does that help answer your question? Jenny, one thing I would add to that, we don't want to go through the process of doing the planning and the design work without getting this implemented now. We don't have the funding to fund all your projects, but we do know where the money is. We do know where the grants are, we have some experience on getting some of these grants. That will be the approach all along is we will try to identify grants early. And we will try to design the project. Not entirely towards the grant, but with an eye towards that grant. We don't want to design in a bubble, We want to be designing towards implementation and fabrication. That will be a strong part of the whole process. Yeah, Shelby has a similar question. Shelby Whittaker from Pekin, I'm not sure about funding for this project. I would really like to bring something like this to my community. Should I start with funding ideas first or go ahead and apply? Oh, and then, but just to add on to that from what I said earlier, I would say just go ahead and apply the application. We're looking for really specific ideas. I think that's the most important piece of that is you don't have to have a budget submitted that shows you already have pledges or donations, or grant funds secured. If you have ideas about where you might be asking for funds, like if you have a good relationship with your local community foundation, or you've received some grants in the past that you think would apply for an upcoming round of applications in the future. That's good to know, but you don't have to have the funding secured by the time you apply. There's a lot of money coming out from the state and the federal government related to place making. The timing is good. Yeah. My colleague at the CRE, Colleen Rose, she's the director of Sustaining Hoosier Communities. I like the way that she calls these projects where we match students with community partners. It's like a pre professional consultation. It's like you're getting all of the tools to get your project ready for, then handing off to like a professional group for the full implementation. As Jon was saying earlier, if anyone has ideas too, of projects they're thinking about and you just want to run ideas, we'd love to hear what you're thinking about. And it's okay if that idea changes by the time you apply. But if you have questions about that specifically, we'd love to chat. Do you want to chat about it right now? Yeah, sure. Okay. Sorry. I have a couple of things that are coming to mind, so that's nice that we have the opportunity to actually ask you. One thing is we have just completed fund raising through IHCBA for as the theater in our town. We've got the funding, we're going to install the theater. However, the next phase of our project is seating installation. We've already had some excavation work done to create this bow shape, but we're really wanting to make it like a tiered structure so that people can sit up on chairs or something along those lines. Do you think that's something that you guys would be interested in looking at? It goes along with placemaking. We have project done, but it is exciting. Yeah, I'll speak as a faculty member for a second. Students need the fun, exciting projects and they also need the projects that are the nitty gritty. The students are hungry for any experience. Don't discount your idea. I think that that would be a fine project for our students. Maybe I'll speak for a second. What's going to determine what projects we take on and we don't take on? It'll depend on the mix of projects. We want to end up with some projects that we can point to at the end of the summer at like a mural or something and say, we did this. But we also want to do some larger scale projects that may not show results for a couple of years. I think it's important for the students. I think it's important for the kind of projects that I think communities are looking to do. The application is not very onerous. We are looking for specific ideas. Let me clarify that a little bit. An example of a specific idea is we want to do something with this parking lot that is not specific enough. But we want to do a park, want to do some thing on this wall that is specific enough. You don't have to have the idea for the mural. We will get through that, that process together, but it shouldn't. We want to do something somewhere and make our town better. It's going to be a little bit more specific, but it doesn't have to have all the details flushed out. Hopefully, that's clear. Yeah, that's super helpful. And then another thing, I represent our community foundation, our local community foundation, but I support many organizations out in the community. I spoke about the nature park, but now I'm thinking of our library and they have projects going on. Is it okay to have those organizations, like multiple projects in the same community? Yeah. Okay. I would have them each submit their own application though. Okay. That sounds good. Thank you. Yeah. So we have another comment in the chat from Mandy Spano and it sounds like also Mandy, please jump in because I'm going to try to summarize this, but I don't want to, you know, butcher. It looks like you're working on a children's arts center. So I would be curious if I could ask, is this just the idea so far? Or if it's something that you've already been working on for a while or like, where are you at in the process. We have been working on this for a while. It's part of a capital campaign that we have been building. And we're actually in phase one of right now, which starts with just working on preserving our building. Phase two will jump into this project, which is based on work we did with our strategic plan to use the arts more holistically for our kiddos, to help with mental health and also provide a place for people to come when they're visiting Downtown Anderson, of course, inspire learning through hands on play and focusing on artistic play. It sounds like a great project. Yeah, yeah. Let me know what your thoughts are on this too. I think this could be a good project for students in terms of that pre architectural design, helping with creating renderings and the visualization of a space that you could then use to apply to your campaigns. Jon, could you talk a little bit more about what pre architectural design means and how we might pass that off to a professional? Yeah. Typically, predesign is about understanding what you're going to put into a space. It's also includes understanding what the existing conditions are. Architectural schematic design would be, We know we want to put a play area in this basement and we're going to create some designs that we can then visualize. At that point, we would be done with our part of it and we would hand that off to a professional who would do a code analysis. They would take some of these ideas and then really flush them out and make sure that they are ready to be built. That's where our work starts and ends. And where a professional might take that further. Now again, we have connections with people, professionals out in the community who, who are interested in working with rural communities. Who we think we can hand off to them and they can finish the project. So hopefully that answers the question. Again, it's coming up with that scope of work and then maybe a design related to that scope of work. Can I ask? So we do have a general layout of how our building would change architecturally as far as moving rooms. Part of this is expanding our classrooms so that it's completely surrounded by windows. But what I don't have, that's only in my brain are the different exhibit spaces. Like for instance, I see a theater space where a child could get on a stage, sing their heart out, set some type of visual display so they could pick an audience and then hear themselves when they get out on headphones. Or even maybe share it with the whole room. But putting that on paper and also having someone with that architectural background I guess would be helpful for us. Yeah, that's something we could do for sure. Okay. Looks like Brian Smith also sing in the chat real quick about they would like to take the median medians that split the main four lane road. Would you be able to help us design that space with flowers, rock planter, something to stand out from? Just grass and a few shrubs? Yeah. Yeah, We don't necessarily like a landscape design in our faculty, but one thing, the students are good at research and they're good at creating designs. Again, the implementation is not something they have the experience in. So we could definitely do something like that. It might not be the same as what a landscape architect would do because we're not that level of professionals. But yeah, that's some work we could definitely work on. I think a good example of a similar project we've done in the past is probably the Parklet in Salem. Would you say Jon? Because there were some plant that were put into that design as well as likes to sit but I don't think you'd want to sit on a median. Nicole, do you want to pull up that image? Yeah, sure. Speak to that opt. Just a little background on this project. This was a project in Salem. It was a leftover space, a parking lot. A couple of things were done. One was the making of this mural in the background that was imagery portraits of women in the history of Salem that have had a big influence. We hired a muralist from New York to come in and paint. Also, you can see in the foreground there, the asphalt was painted. We made this asphalts painted path that went from this park to the downtown. It connects different parts of the city. The other thing that we did was we built this boardwalk with planters and we speced out furniture and some lighting. This project gives you a good sense of what's possible, what we have experience doing. The good thing is there's enough faculty, there's enough expertise at IU that we don't know how to do it. We can reach out to people and try to solve it. Yeah, I think that's where the Landscape Art and Architecture office came in, is that right? The connection with our faculty, the students worked with that office and got a lot of really great, like firsthand experience seeing how that stuff works. I had a question regarding whether you may do this in years to come as well. You mentioned that this is new, and I'm sure that will depend on how this goes for you guys. But I am working with a nonprofit that has not yet received our nonprofit designation. I don't think we'll have our act together enough to qualify for this deadline. But I'm down here in Ferdinand, near Nyberg and Jasper, which were used several times, for example. I see how this can work and be great, but I just don't think it's going to happen for us this year. How do you see maybe this program going next year? Yeah, I can speak to that real quick. Definitely. I have the goal, we have the ambitions to make sure it's an annual thing and we have that support from our leadership at the Ieri and Eskenazi. I think definitely around this time next year we'll be anticipating, I guess, launching the second cohort of this group, Lauren, that would be great to see your application at some point. But you can also reach out if you want to chat more about your project, because there might be other ways that the Center for Real Engagement can work with you. This goes in general with other projects for other organizations or groups. If you feel like you're not quite ready for this year, there might be a different time of year that we can engage with you, maybe in a different way. Maybe not necessarily through placemaking, but typically the center, we're like a matchmaker between community partners and the resources at our university. There might be another way that we can partner with you. Another thought too, is that in the application, in terms of like designating like a 513 or other nonprofit organization, it doesn't necessarily have to be yours. Lauren, if like you have a really close community partner that you can work with that would receive charitable funds on your behalf and would be able to distribute or disbursed to you for the project. That's also possible, but as long as there was like a working relationship and pad for how that would work. If you're applying as like a concerned citizen, you can indicate who you'd be partnering with in the application to make sure that there was like a receptacle for those funds before you got your nonprofit status. Thank you. That's super helpful. I'll keep that in mind. Yeah. Jon, are you going to add on to that at all? No. You did a great awesome. Any other questions for us? And if you have a question come up later, you can always reach out to me and I can forward it along to Jon if it's out of my area of expertise. Otherwise, I think we might be able to end this little early. Okay. Well, Jon, was there anything we thanks for your time. We're excited to work with all of you again. Let me stress that. If you're not sure if it's a good match, just apply anyway. Hopefully the application won't take too long. The students I know are really excited. Let me maybe one last word on how we might work. This is not a class going to be set, the students are working on your project. A portion of the summer is going to be set up like an office. I think that's the best analogy. There will be two graduate students and up to five undergraduate students, and all of their work will be supervised by a faculty member, is going to be the focus of the summer. The students will, we're going to choose students who are professional, who are committed to doing the work well. If you've had experiences with IU classes in the past, I will assure you that hopefully this will be a better experience. Thank you all so much for joining us. You can reach at any time you have questions or even just comments. Since we're going through this for the first time in terms of rural placemaking studio, I'd love to learn from you how you think it's going. If there are things that you want me to clarify, I'm always happy to do that. Thanks so much for your time and interest. Have a great rest of your day.