Project and Process: Pua Foundation Seaview Property

It's interesting how certain projects seem to grow with you. In this post, I will be sharing one of my own projects - working with a volunteer group of young land planners and architects to design a conceptual site plan for a local non-profit organization's Manoa headquarters/scholar dormitory. When I first jumped on-board with this initiative in 2008, my intentions were mainly to find out more about land planning as a potential career. Now two and a half years later, this project has evolved to become more architectural in nature, and although I don't intend to become a planner or an architect, I still find myself learning so much, as concepts taken from the design process of this project are applicable to any type of design field.

OUR PROJECT

Since 2008, a volunteer group from PBR HAWAII & Associates, Inc. has been providing pro bono land planning services to local non-profit organization Pua Foundation. Within the past year, the group's task has evolved and been more clearly defined to generate site plan renderings for a new facility, located on Seaview Avenue in Manoa, which will serve as the Foundation's headquarters, as well as provide rental units for visiting scholars to the nearby University of Hawaii; these renderings will ultimately be used as part of marketing materials as the Foundation seeks funding to build this facility.  

The challenge for the team is to design a dual-functioning building on a limited space that will also align with the Foundation's mission and deep Hawaiian values. The team will also have to take into account various zoning and topographic restrictions of the site. 

OUR DESIGN TEAM

Since the start of the partnership between PBR HAWAII and Pua Foundation, a few more designers have joined the team. Currently the design team consists of the following volunteers:

Tara DePonte, Planner and Landscape Designer at Helber Hastert & Fee Planners

Stevie-Lyn Kim, Administrative Assistant at PBR HAWAII & Associates, Inc.

Merrick Patten, D.Arch candidate at University of Hawaii at Manoa

Michael Shibata, Planner at PBR HAWAII & Associates, Inc.

Luke Lopaka Williams, Designer and Cultural Architect at RIM Architects

Melanie Wong, Planner at PBR HAWAII & Associates, Inc.

OUR CLIENT - PUA FOUNDATION

The Pua Foundation is a Manoa-based non-profit organization created in 1996 as part of the apology, redress, and reconciliation initiatives of the United Church of Christ and the Hawaiian people for the Church’s complicity in the 1893 overthrow. The mission of the Foundation is to facilitate opportunities for a deeper and clearer understanding of various impacts of the overthrow by engaging community dialogue and encouraging public discourse about reconciling Hawaii's past to its present to build a better future for Hawaii.

One part of Church's redress package was a 8,563 square foot parcel of land located just off University Avenue. The existing building on top that land was once a small church and now serves as the Foundation's headquarters. In 2009, the Foundation decided it would re-build the property and also add rental units for visiting scholars to the nearby University of Hawaii.

OUR PROCESS 

Values-Generating Activity with the Foundation Board Members. Before the design team even put pen to paper, we sought to get a clearer understanding of the Foundation's mission and the other important values that would be incorporated into the design of the facility. The team met with the Foundation Board Members to facilitate discussion that would draw out these important values. The outcome of the session were three Hawaiian values of Kipuka (sense of place), Kau hale (community connection), and Puu honua (retreat). Two other non-Hawaiian values would need to also be considered in designing the building - sustainability and economics.

Design Charette with Other Volunteer Designers. To help our team generate creative design ideas for the site, we invited ten (other) designers to a design charette in which each participant was given one hour to draw a site plan, elevations/sections, and vignette(s) of his/her overall concept for the Seaview property. Each plan had to take into account not only the five values that the Board decided on in the previous activity, but also the site's physical, programmatic, and zoning constraints. After the drawing session was complete, each designer had three minutes to present his/her plan to the group and the Board.

In a separate meeting, the design team was able to extract common design elements (such as entryways and views to the outside, site line through building, transitions between/separation of private, semi-private, and public spaces, garden/outdoor areas) that will at a later point be pieced together to form the refined plans.

"What's Their Story?" Future-User Profiling Activity with Foundation Board Members. While the design charette provided more quantitative design information, they now sought to unlock the more qualitative information - the touchy-feely stuff - that would make this facility special and unique to the Foundation and the other future facility "users". Each Board Member Participant was assigned a future-user of the facility (Foundation Staff, Foundation Visitor, Resident Visiting Scholar, "Wild Card" Visitor/Passer-Byer) and using all five senses, was tasked with creating a "day in the life" story of that individual. We wanted to know how the Board ideally envisioned each user to interact with the facility, as well as the other users there.

The outcome of this activity was the drawing out of different design concepts that will be incorporated into the final site plan. Common themes among all four future-users were a feeling of home, calming, openness, food & fellowship,  and methods for transformation of the heart. These themes may translate into such design elements as a large entrance and flourier, windows with views to the outside/nature, a larger communal kitchen, etc.

NEXT STEPS

With all the great qualitative and quantitative information collected from these sessions, the design team plans to meet internally to brainstorm and draw various development scenarios for the facility. In approximately one month's time, we will have three alternative site plans for the Foundation Board to review and critique. (During this period, we may also decide to hold a community meeting to present these plans to the Foundation's neighbors in order to hear their comments.) Following that meeting, we will refine the preferred site plan and finalize it for use in the Foundation's marketing materials. 

Happenings: HCC Portfolio Show 2011

Honolulu Community College's Communication Arts graduating class will be presenting their design portfolios this Wednesday, May 4. They've also created a fun website - [re]FORM HCC Correctional Center to build hype around the jail-themed event. You can get a preview of the designers' portfolios on the site as well.

One of the student designers to present at the portfolio show.

In The News: Juicies’ raises $5,000 in 3 days to produce technicolor iPhone chargers

In the magazine's online blog, Hawaii Business Magazine's Jason Ubay discusses how Laurens Laudowicz and crew were able to fundraise (and exceed) the $5,000 needed to fund the production of the sustainable and colorful iPhone, iPad, and iPod chargers. The article in its entirety can be found here.

The goal was to raise $5,000 in 30 days. It took only 3.

Juicies, a Hawaii-based company producing colorful charger cords for Apple’s ubiquitous hand-held products, started a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign on Friday, April 22. (Kickstarter presents a creative project on its site and individuals pledge money to get the project off the ground. Pledges can be as low as $1. Basically, the social media crowd funds the project.)

By Friday afternoon, Juicies had raised more than $1,500. By 11 p.m. on Sunday, April 24, it was over the $5,000 mark. Michael Sorenson (@RECreateHI), a business partner in the venture, says they’re excited about hitting their goal and credits strong support from Hawaii residents. “A lot of it went viral locally,” he says. (If you’d like to see for yourself, there’s plenty of buzz on the #Juicies Twitter hashtag.)
The goal now is to get as many Juicies chargers into people’s hands as they can.

Apple’s iPhone, iPod and iPad products all have accessories in myriad designs to personalize the gadgets, but local entrepreneur Laurens Laudowicz (@laudowicz) has tapped a previously untouched concept – multicolor charger cords. Until now, the chargers only came in white.

After a few home test trials coloring existing chargers with dyes and spray paint, Laudowicz decided to use a manufacturer. The product has been designed locally and will be produced at an undisclosed offshore location. All rubber and plastic parts will come from recycled materials like plastic bottles, and the wiring and 30-pin connector comes from the same manufacturer that Apple uses. (Check out Juicies Facebook page to see the difference between using the original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, and a cheap knockoff.)

Sorenson says they used Kickstarter instead of a traditional bank loan because they wanted to engage the local community and give them the ability to be part of the project. Aside from a media appearance locally on KHON, the story has only appeared on blogs locally and nationally. No money has been spent on “traditional” advertising.

Last Friday, Sorenson said the company believes it can raise much more than its $5,000 goal. Worldwide, there are around 450 million iPods, iPhones and iPad owners. The ultimate goal for the company is to have the product alongside other accessory products at Apple’s retail stores.

All current pledges will be fulfilled, but, because Juicies wants to produce the charger cords in a sustainable way, the manufacturing costs will be high. Sorenson says they’d like to fulfill the remaining pledges to get as many Juicies cords in people’s hands as possible.

Pledges have come from Hawaii, across the United States from California to New York, and internationally in places like Australia, Hong Kong, Italy, Canada, Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The cords come in 9 different colors and a 10th mystery color. There’s an incentive with each pledge, depending on the amount. A pledge of $1 or more gets a Juicie cable. (The Juicies Kickstarter page says a fair retail price would be $19. As of April 26, 1,800 pledges – and 1,800 cables – were available.) For a pledge of $200, the buyer gets all 10 colors plus a box of pineapples, which can be shipped internationally. And two people can pledge $5,000 each and receive a table-top version of Kasey McMahon’s Connected art piece.

The Juicie cable is compatible with all iPhone, iPod and iPad products using the 30-pin connector.

Happenings: Talk Story Sessions, May 29 2011

This Monday, Ara Laylo (@aralaylo), Creative Director of Flux Magazine, tweeted a flyer twitpic for "a series of workshops by musicians, artists, graphic designers, and small business owners." Among the graphic design participants are local firms Wall-to-Wall Studios and Humanhand. I will update this post with more info as it becomes available.

*update* More information has been released!! It seems the event is a Flux + CMA Hawaii + Waikiki EDITION partnership to promote arts and music education in Hawaii. Find out more info and register for the event here.