20 bring canoes, kayaks, and trained attendants to help neighbors move through the river along the park’s edge, and to meet visiting turtles and other wildlife. 5. New Thinking Pathways While we sometimes design surveys to quantify feedback from community participants, more frequently we provide design exercises that allow the entire team — neighbors and designers together — to build a shared visual language around the project. These include base maps, where we ask residents to indicate the path of their own personal walking loops, key sites of significance, or problem areas. They include model-making activities with kids designing and writing about their dream park pavilions. They include sketchbooks where participants in the Riverwalk can see their familiar surroundings in a new way through drawing — opening up possibilities for sharing ideas on the page. In partnership with The Mastheads’ Literary Director, we provide poetry prompts for residents to describe the relationships between their neighborhood, community, and family. 6. Tell the Story Once a general identity, program, and scope for the project response begins to cohere, we plan a local exhibition where we tell the story back to a broader community and to the residents who have participated over months of community happenings. This includes displaying their work, their words, their architectural models, photographs, drawings, memories, and histories alongside the emerging design. This presentation happens at the Schematic Design phase of development. It is an opportunity to show an early iteration, Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025
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