“Public Participatory Graphic Communications”

Abstract

Ball State University is a public university in the state of Indiana which has a College of Architecture and Planning; its Community Based Program (CBP) was developed and created in 1969, and is now one of the three oldest continuous community education and service programs in the US. The program’s main objectives are to provide an educational design service to the public sector, to immerse our students in a public participatory urban design environment, and to educate the public sector to become active in the design and planning process of their communities. After my Urban Design Graduate studies at Harvard, I published two urban design booklets (the Urban Design Primer and the Urban Design Dictionary) for public distribution, to be utilized prior to our small-town charrettes. These illustrated booklets were designed to bridge the language and design process gap between the design professional and the public citizen, and to create a more active immersive participatory urban design engagement. Since the introduction and public use of these booklets, I have been involved with over a hundred CBP charrettes. In this paper, I will introduce and present the urban design public booklets, and demonstrate how the urban design graphics and visual communications were utilized effectively through several small-town charrette case studies. The paper will also blend the transition between the analog graphics and the digital imagery.