work in progress | women in practice

The Design Collective Behind care for Hudson Square's Restorative Ground Takes Our Questions

By Julia Gamolina

WIP Collaborative is a shared feminist practice of independent design professionals (Abby Coover, Bryony Roberts, Elsa Ponce, Lindsay Harkema, Ryan Brooke Thomas, Sera Ghadaki, and Sonya Gimon) focused on research and design projects that engage community and the public realm. Restorative Ground, an interactive destination that opens today, came out of a proposal that was commissioned by Urban Design Forum for Care for Hudson Square, a recovery initiative in partnership with Hudson Square Properties and Hudson Square Business Improvement District to reactivate the public realm with a placemaking installation. In the summer of 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Urban Design Forum invited proposals to strategize using the streetscape as a site for cultural reawakening after months of social isolation.

WIP’s winning design will act as a new destination in Hudson Square, a place for a range of experiences, activities and interactions to occur between residents, community members, and the broader public. As a dynamic platform for public life to re-emerge, the installation will create a place for individual and collective engagement, recreation, and healing. Located on King St, between Hudson and Greenwich Streets, the installation will also serve as a node of activation within the network of outdoor public spaces and existing creative agencies in the neighborhood.

The design proposal draws from ongoing research by WIP Collaborative about inclusive playspaces for neurodiverse populations of all ages and abilities. Through a series of interviews with experts and self-advocates from diverse populations, WIP has gained important insights about the design of the public realm. Rather than a neutralized one-size-fits-all approach, this research has highlighted the importance of providing a range of spatial qualities – high and low stimulation, tactile materials and textures, and distinct experiential zones – in the design of a truly inclusive and supportive environment for all. The installation will create a dynamic platform for public life to re-emerge in Hudson Square; a place for individual and collective engagement, recreation, and healing.

Ahead of opening day, WIP Collaborative took our questions on both the founding of the group, and Restorative Ground:

Lindsay Harkema - Founder, WIP

Ryan Brooke Thomas - Principal, Kalos Eidos

Elsa Ponce - Managing Director, OACny

Sera Ghadaki - Creative Director, SERA GHADAKI

Bryony Roberts - Principal, Bryony Roberts Studio

Abby Coover - Founder and Director, Overlay Office + Co-Founder, Design Advocates

Sonya Gimon - Landscape Designer, Sonya Gimon

JG: As the founder, tell me where the seed of the idea came from, first for the larger WIP community, and then for the collaborative. How did the collaborative become what it is, out of the larger community?

Lindsay Harkema: WIP Community emerged from conversations with other women who had recently founded their independent design practices during the time that I was establishing my own. There was a consensus that a group which could provide resource and experience sharing, like peer-to-peer mentorship, as well as opportunities for collaboration, would be mutually beneficial. In the context of a profession that has not traditionally been supportive of women, it felt necessary to create something that could help us to empower each other's practices as well as our own. 

WIP Collaborative formed within that larger group, and the seven of us also had shared past work, volunteer, and academic experiences. Together, we combine professional experience in architecture, landscape, urban design, fashion, and community engagement. We’ve now successfully completed a handful of research and design projects by adapting our structure to fit the needs of the work and our individual schedules. Generally speaking, all projects are shared, but some members are more active in leadership or specific knowledge-based positions in different phases.

Talk to me about how the need for more flexible structure of support drove the collaboration. I think we will be seeing these kinds of models more and more in the coming years.

Ryan Brooke Thomas: The interest in pursuing a collective model for practice stemmed from a commitment to the idea that experimental models can yield exciting and productive outcomes. The flexibility of a joint venture offers a dynamic feedback loop of support, exchanged ideas, and cumulative effort that has been rewarding. As we dialogue and face new opportunities together, our structure continues to evolve and shapeshift to meet more clearly defined goals; part of this also means encountering moments of debate and negotiation, as any partnership must. It’s all part of the experiment.

Elsa Ponce: Most of us have experienced working environments where strong hierarchies rule, while others have never been in groups with fair, transparent structures. By cultivating a flexible and participatory practice, we are finding new ways of working together and acknowledging our different experiences, capacities, desires, talents, and interests. To have a shared vision does not mean everyone is similar, it means we all complement each other in such a way that we can coordinate our actions towards projects that meet our own and each other’s aspirations.

Sera Ghadaki: As independent practitioners who wear multiple hats — designers, architects, business owners, mothers, educators, directors and founders, to name a few — having support rooted in feminist ideals helps our shared projects succeed and augments our respective endeavors. WIP has supported my own multidisciplinary work in profound and unexpected ways. I’ve had the aspiration to seek out like-minded collaborators and a community of multidisciplinary designers, and being part of this collaborative with six other designers to brainstorm, work, and mutually learn from each other has been an empowering and liberating way to realize that goal.

What was the first project you collaborated on as a group? What was the process like?

Bryony Roberts: Many of us met at the first WIP gathering, and shortly afterwards Lindsay shared an RFP asking if anyone wanted to collaborate. That RFP asked teams to develop ideas about creating more inclusive and intergenerational public space, and we took that as a launching point for our shared research interests. We saw a lot of shortcomings in existing public spaces, particularly for women, people of color, children, and people with disabilities. We brought our own individual research and personal interests to the table, thinking particularly about the sensory and psychological dimensions of public space and the need to support different kinds of sensitivities and vulnerabilities through a greater degree of choice for the public. Although the initial RFP was suspended due to the pandemic, we kept going with the research through  interviews with advocates and self-advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, as well as teenagers and parents to understand intergenerational perspectives. 

Sera Ghadaki: For that initial RFP call, we documented our research and interviews using an evolving visual matrix we developed to better understand the complexities of designing public spaces for broader sensory sensitivities. A common sentiment from the interviews and research was that designs and policies that may have been intended for a specific population can end up enhancing the way that many people experience public spaces. We found successively more nuances in each stage of research. In a way, the pause on that RFP gave us an opportunity to spend more time with our findings and craft an even more intentional foundation.

Abby Coover: It was incredibly informative and inspiring to speak with various individuals across populations. Through the interactive, qualitative matrix that we set up on Miro, we were able to not just have these conversations be question and answer based, but to have them be collaborative working sessions where we were really able to get a sense for the desired experiences and sensations of each potential user group. This has led to a collective body of knowledge based on use and experience that can act as the basis for future projects and similar collaborations with the end users of public spaces.

How did you decide to pursue the Care for Hudson Square competition, that led to Restorative Ground? What was that process like, especially factoring in all of your expertise in architecture, landscape and urban design, community engagement?

Sonya Gimon: A temporary installation in the public realm aimed at reactivating the streetscape is a great example of a project where architecture, landscape and urban design and community engagements really blend. Any of these disciplines could claim this scope as their own. With WIP we are not interested in re-affirming the borders of the disciplines, but rather demonstrating that they are part of one. As someone with a varied background and experience in all of the above disciplines, I most enjoyed approaching the creative process as a sum of individuals regardless of associated disciplines.

Ryan Brooke Thomas: When this competition was announced, different subsets of our group connected about the possibility of collaboration. The brief helped us realize not only an aligned approach to the opportunity, but also to see the potential of our complementary skill sets, backgrounds and interests. What helps our collaborative efforts gel is the fact that no one claims expertise in one area—in fact we’ve each tended to situate our independent careers in ways that seek to expand the edges of what architecture can encompass as a discipline.

Abby Coover: When we first received the information for the Care for Hudson Square competition, we knew that this was a fantastic opportunity to translate the research that we had been doing. I think the concern with a group of seven individuals working in parallel on a project is that the design intent and vision can easily become watered down. As a group, we were able to pivot organically through this challenge and to each take ownership of certain parts of the project — programming, form, materials, for example — while at the same time working collaboratively to create a cohesive whole. Tools such as Miro and Slack enabled us to work this way in a manner that I do not know could have been achieved pre-pandemic.

What was the design and realization process like? With seven collaborators, how did you all build consensus, make final decisions, etc?

Ryan Brooke Thomas: The design process occurred largely during the lockdown period of the pandemic, so for much of that process we were working mostly through online platforms. Certainly that posed challenges, but it also pushed us to discover new, often surprisingly fluid, ways of working that harnessed the cumulative strength of individual contributions at different moments. Especially in the realization process, we’ve also made a point of shifting roles and combinations of people focused on different components of the process which keeps all of us engaged in all aspects of the project, while also having flexibility around scheduling and other logistics.

Sera Ghadaki: What shaped our design process was collectively facing multiple new and simultaneous experiences: our first time collaborating in this permutation, largely all working together remotely, all during a pandemic, in an exhausting year. As a result, we were inherently, deliberately iterative. Whether working through a phase collectively or in smaller groups, we ensured that everyone had the opportunity to weigh in on final decisions. Logistically, sometimes in the form of a thumbs up in Slack or head nod on video, and other times a more layered workflow of editing shared documents or presenting multiple approaches for collaborative input.

Elsa Ponce: We co-created Restorative Ground from a place of cooperation and care, which has been personally liberating and inspiring, especially in a time of increased anxiety. To build a participatory design process with seven collaborators takes intentional work, doing it while working remotely adds to the challenge, but to build consensus it’s been a fundamental part of our process. Consensus encourages us to find out more about each other while recognizing that conflict is a normal part of the process too. Every new project we work on is an opportunity to do interesting work, strengthen our relationship and improve internal practices while sharpening the group’s collective abilities.

You talked about how this structure allows each participant to also bolster their independent practices. How so? How did it in the case of Restorative Ground?

Sonya Gimon: The structure of a union of independent professionals provides intimate connection to other people and practices while ensuring space and respect to each others’ separate endeavors. This independence is lacking from other established professional structures and, I believe, is the one that both nurtures collaboration and encourages the development of strong individual voices and focuses at once. As someone with a focus on landscape, environment and wildlife, being part of the collaborative creates an opportunity to both work on broader and more specific topics.

Bryony Roberts: We’re able to reach out to the others and get immediate advice about anything from accounting to insurance to teaching, etc. We also learn a lot from each other, since we all have different kinds of expertise. It’s an opportunity to look under the hood at how other people run their practices and learn from their experiences. In addition, the projects that we do expose us to issues that we can explore further in our individual practices. For example, the research that we did last summer and our community engagement for Restorative Ground prompted me to do further work with advocates with disabilities, such as in a project I just opened at the High Museum in Atlanta. 

Ryan Brooke Thomas: As the sole principal of a design office, experiencing a collective partnership is inherently complementary in so many aspects of process, interaction, methodology, identity, etc. Those differences are mutually productive in stimulating creativity, nurturing growth and expanding capacity. The agile nature of the collaboration is well-suited for project types and research agenda that can be challenging to gain access to and also to prioritize resource-wise as a small practice. WIP Collaborative’s focus on pursuing work aimed at shaping the public realm – and Restorative Ground in particular – has enabled those interests and ambitions to acquire greater agency, dimension and impact. 

Lindsay Harkema: I see the Collaborative more as an expansion of our independent practices than a discrete entity. Which means that we are able to take on larger and potentially more ambitious work than is immediately feasible on our own, and also that we gain a level of shared knowledge and expertise from working together. For Restorative Ground, which required architectural, landscape, urban, and community-based design work, this expanded practice was essential to the project. And since it emerged from an earlier shared research endeavor, we could apply the ideas already established in that collaborative work towards the design. 

The collaborative came about in the pandemic, during which we truly saw that there's no such thing as work and life separation - it's all one life. How did this kind of collaborative structure help with the needed flexibility in this regard?

Linsday Harkema: For many independent design practitioners the personal and the professional are not mutually exclusive. The pandemic revealed many shortcomings of conventional professional practice’s ignorance of personal lives, families, etc. With WIP, an organization that inherently challenges disciplinary norms, we found efficient ways to work together and on our own terms -- short and strategic group meetings, a divide-and-conquer workflow, as well as utilizing collaborative tools like Slack and virtual whiteboards to enable asynchronous work. Within this group we’ve experienced many significant life events including relocations, marriages, and pregnancies during this time, and when one person needs to lighten their workload for a period, the collaborative structure enables us to balance it out.

Abby Coover: Owning a small design firm is often isolating and one of the biggest reasons that I began to get involved with WIP was to find professional and personal support from a group of like minded individuals. I quickly found this support and also a vibrant and inspiring design community. With the onset of the pandemic, all of our futures, both near and far, were unknown. I found that navigating this uncertainty with WIP also helped me do the same in my own design business and personal life. It is refreshing and inspiring to work with people where you do not need to apologize when your personal life takes over your work life or vice versa. The group is always supportive and the mutual understanding that we shift responsibilities as needed to support each other holistically for things such as other work opportunities, travel, marriages, and babies has been an incredibly rewarding and empowering experience that I will continue to have with WIP, but also to expect from other collaborations. 

What's next for WIP? How do you see WIP evolving?

Sonya Gimon: As a designer who has a focus on landscape design, environment and community engagement and is committed to creating a positive change for people, environment and wildlife alike, I see WIP continue to be a collective that is able to identify and tackle complex and multi-layered problems, and, importantly, creating opportunities to do so beyond conventional project set-ups. Focus on sensory inclusivity in public space, that we are pursuing in multiple projects including Restorative Ground, is just one example of this purpose-driven approach. 

Ryan Brooke Thomas: Many of us are involved in educating the next generation of emerging designers, whether as studio professors in architecture and design programs, as professional leaders in our independent practices or as mentors in various design communities. Teaching design studios opens a wider forum for dialogue, experimentation, and research development in a way that extends and expands the research, speculation, and inquiry that is central to our independent practices. Through WIP, we hope to find opportunities to further explore the work that we’ve commenced this past year in those settings, as well as to consider collaborative models of mentorship.

Lindsay Harkema: I’m excited about WIP’s future growth as an adaptive, multifaceted, and continuously evolving organization. WIP Collaborative is a work in progress itself, inspired by prior models of worker cooperatives and feminist design collectives. Up to this point, we’ve been self-adjusting in response to project opportunities like Restorative Ground. While that has enabled us to test our working model and calibrate as we go, we’ve also been thinking about potential structures that both maintain the agility and better establish our collective identity for the future. I hope that we continue to find opportunities to improve the public realm through our projects, and that our values-driven way of working together is a catalyst for changing the norms of the profession.