This group project between Samantha Swol, Luke Fabricatore, and Mai Nguyen saw us exploring a specific set of environmental issues - flooding &/ droughts.

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT:
Our group ‘No Drought About It’ then began to research these environmental issues from global to local. We investigated the many solutions in practice among different regions, and documented these. Using this documentation we began several brainstorm sessions for ideas and solutions from impractical to impossible, with every idea falling in-between written and sketched out.

SPECULATIVE DESIGN:
We then began to prompt ourselves to think into speculative solutions. We came up with the idea of a series of scalable FloatPlots. These plots were inspired by Detroits vacant plots of land that are paved, causing flooding, and worsening eroding during droughts. We thought, what if you were able to create ‘bowls’ that could collect the floodwater in these plots of land, and then create a stable platform to host usable land above these reservoirs of water.

PROTOTYPING & BUILDING:
Our prototype demonstrates the idea of adding a public park on top of one of the FloatPlots, and the park would repurpose the water for plants, fountains, or any other number of maintenance needs. This could be scaled to host buildings, factories, or more to enable building in flood zones and reduce the impact of both environmental crisis. We then branded this in a way that would entice the local community of Detroit, and not alienate any residents. Through our research, we generated a persona and built our presentation around telling his story.

TOOLS:
Completed in Affinity Designer 2, Keynote, Photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign, Miro, Laser Cutter, Blender & 3D printing.