Gems of Kolding

description

As part of the Design Camp 2012 I joined a team of four international and Danish students that were given the slightly daunting task of working with the municipality of Kolding with some of their major challenges. The intention was to merge nudging and design methods to create a tangible, measureable design solution that would create a positive behavior change. Kolding Municipality wanted to create more flow and city pulse.

“There is a common perception that the city centre is dying, that the shops are empty, that there is not enough activity” 

- Malene Leerberg, Kolding Municipality/Dept. for City & Development

Our research of existing behaviors around these statements resulted in a more succinct re-briefed statement of the problem space, allowing us to work with a targeted, measurable behavior intervention of how we might draw people into Kolding's spaces of opportunity.

“Gems of Kolding” is a seervice design concept aimed to attract and lead people to the “negative spaces” of the city; the empty store fronts, the out-of-business signage, the closing down posters which all evoked a negative feeling of city abandonment.

The design solution consisted of “impossible to miss” visual cues of vivid fluorescent orange diamond-shaped stickers that were placed on the abandoned storefronts.  Powerful enough to counteract the existing negatively charged visual language of the empty spaces, the “gems” had links to the “Gems of Kolding” web site, a collective space featuring an interactive map of all the opportunity space in Kolding without effort-charged barriers such as multiple private estate agents etc. Also a space for the real estate agents and the Municipality to pro-actively and collaboratively create a simpler interface and incentive structure to draw business and people into empty spaces.

In addressing the issue of convoluted entry points into Kolding,  large fluorescent orange picture frames were placed as recurring motifs in the town scape in order to direct people to points of interest. Kolding is a historical Medieval city and has an immense wealth in this heritage but also issues to contend with as the city structure of this era is quite “closed off” in comparison to the “open-source” era we are influenced by in 2013.