A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY THAT'S DEFINING THE FUTURE OF...
  • MARCH 9, 2011

    A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY THAT'S DEFINING THE FUTURE OF A PHYSICAL ONE 

    New tools are allowing plugged-in seniors to craft their own retirement community

    Bruce Mau Design recently worked as a part of a team with HWKN architects to develop the design of a new LGBT retirement community in Palm Springs, California. The project was recently featured on Co. Design in “BOOM! Palm Springs Plans a Wacky, $250m Old Folks' Community for Gays.”

    The project will be designed by 10 amazing established and up-and-coming architecture firms, and will feature a rooftop disco and a climbing wall. But one of the most exciting features is the blurred distinction between the community as it exists physically, and the one that’s emerging online.

    Our work started with designing the story of the place. That included the name and the visual identity. We weren’t satisfied with the notion that a retirement village, let alone a LGBT retirement village, should be treated conventionally, and so the more active name and logo were designed to reflect the unusual, vibrant, and exciting nature of the project. And so, together, we worked toward a name that matched that vitality: BOOM!

    As we moved on to the online component of the project, the two teams worked very closely to understand where the real focus should be.

    As we began to talk about how the project would live online, we decided that the conventional approach to web design -- developing a site that works across all browsers -- was not the right approach for BOOM! We learned that our community was made up mostly of early adopters, who favored mobile- and tablet-based browsing, and so we created a site that would be best experienced on the iPad and iPhone. That meant no Flash and a slightly awkward layout on a regular browser, but we were more interested in appealing to fewer, but more advanced, users who would be part of the community.

    Then things got really exciting. The HWKN and BMD teams worked together to think about how the online community could begin to drive the design of the physical space. Since the project is in master planning mode, there was an opportunity to let the community begin to shape the character of the place. Through a part of the site called “The Configurator,” interested prospective community members can share their interests, (such as tennis), with the designers of the master plan. As the project evolves and more participants share their interests, the online community will begin to inform how the master plan develops. If it’s a community of tennis players, the project will get more tennis facilities.

    This isn’t an entirely new idea. Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District is soliciting community participation and opinions on how that site might respond to the needs of the local citizens. Architects, like HWKN, are realizing that there’s a great opportunity to make the traditionally slow moving fields of architecture and urban planning more fluid and responsive by providing online platforms to capture the desires of the people who matter most: those that will live there.

    Full Post on Fast Company

Description
BMD Post on Fast Company Design
Fields
News
Date
2011
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