A Q&A with Public Space Design Expert Hannah Berkin-Harper
Spotlight articles shine a light on designers and design materials we admire. Our founder and principal designer Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman has met many wonderful designers in her time in the industry, and in our Spotlight interviews we ask them about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with industrial designer and design educator Hannah Berkin-Harper. Hannah is the lead designer at the nonprofit Street Lab, where she spearheads innovative, public space design work. She is also a professor at Pratt Institute and has her own business, HBH Design. While she has experience in furniture, products, tableware, and interiors through her own business and her previous work at Karim Rashid Studio, she is currently dedicated to bringing communities together and improving the urban landscape through interactive experience design. We asked her about Street Lab’s philosophy, how she incorporates sustainability into her design work, and how temporary neighborhood pop-ups can lead to lasting community transformation.
Q: Could you talk about what Street Lab is and how you came to be involved?
A: Streetlab is a nonprofit that creates and shares programs for public space all across New York City. We create programming and also physical design, and deliver it to the streets of New York. Things go out on the street and then, a few hours later, we take them back. It’s all quick pop-up activations, and Street Lab does them to improve the urban environment and bring people together. I started collaborating with Street lab in 2018 when I did a pro bono design project with another nonprofit called Open Architecture NYC, which is a group that offers free design build services to nonprofits and community groups. I designed a new flat pack table for Street Lab and we hit it off. I did several more collaborations with them and then moved my practice in-house in 2022 and became their design lead.
Q: Can you tell us about the philosophy behind Street Lab’s approach to public space design?
A: We rely on custom designs, high quality materials, and experienced staff to create experiences that communities love. Street Lab’s approach to public space design is a now approach. We create designs that can be easily set up and taken down, that make an immediate visual impact, that are simple and meaningful, that are accessible, and that provide a positive experience. Change in the public realm can be really slow. Pop-ups show what’s possible and can create inspiration for permanent change.
Street Lab is unique in that we’re both a design studio and also a service provider. We send staff with our programs that help facilitate activities and keep everything going. Every time we do a pop-up, we send a truck or a van with whatever program we’re sending out for the day. It could be a reading room or a draw program or it could be social seating, or something else. We usually have two staff members who go out with the kit for that day and they’ll set it up and facilitate activities. For example, for the DRAW program they’ll set up an attractive display of drawing materials along with some prompts for what you might draw. There are different setups; different kinds of paper, different tools. All of our materials are well-maintained and super high quality, which is important to creating something that feels special. The staff members help facilitate, so they’ll talk to kids while they’re drawing, ask them what they’re doing, and interact with people on the street. They also refresh materials and make sure everything is cleaned up, maybe hang up artwork, and then they take everything apart and load it back on the truck.
Not much invitation is necessary to get the community to participate. We usually work at the invitation of a community group or a public space. The staff keep everything looking fresh, they make sure that people know it’s for them, that it’s free, and that they can come and hang out. Our programs are open; you could come for five minutes or you could come for two hours. There’s no time limit. There’s no, Oh I missed it! I’m 10 minutes late. Our staff makes that possible.
Q: Can you share an example of a successful public space transformation and how it impacted the community?
A: There are a lot of examples because we have relationships with so many different communities that we have built over the last ten years. One place that comes to mind is Jennings Road in the Bronx. Street Lab has been going there for over ten years. It started with bringing our portable reading room to a play street that was entirely run by volunteers, which is common for a lot of these play streets and Open Streets.
Play streets are streets that are closed for kids, and they pre-date the official New York City Open Street system. Community groups would be able to close a street and make it a play space. There are historic play streets. You can see historical photos of New York City with the hydrants open and kids playing street games.
There’s a community organization called the Caldwell Enrichment Program. When we worked with them in 2021, we helped them get funding and support to become an official Open Street with the city. That was the first time that anybody had been paid or supported to do the work that they had been doing, and we’d been going up there since 2013. Last year the Yankees honored Street Lab, and the players came to Jennings Street. It was a huge deal for the kids on that street. I mean, if you’re a kid from the Bronx and the Yankees show up to play with you…It was just amazing. It was fun for us, too! We had all of our gear out and the Yankees were at our drawing tables. That’s a space that is getting great recognition and support.
Lonnie Hardy, who runs Caldwell Enrichment, is working to create a network of Bronx Open Streets that can all share resources. These repeated engagements—and the relationship building that goes with them—create lasting change. There are kids in that neighborhood who have grown up coming to that place to read again and again, being involved in Street Lab programs. I think that’s also really special and meaningful.
Q: How do you incorporate sustainability principles into a temporary project like a pop-up?
A: We try to use responsible materials, and we have to balance that with a need for extreme durability. We’re starting to use a hundred percent upcycled plastic in some of our seating, and we’re meticulous about waste. We try to find uses for every inch of a sheet material. We also practice design for disassembly, so everything’s modular. A lot of our objects can be knocked down with no hardware, so we can replace a part versus a whole. We try to make repairs, we use a minimum of single-use materials, and we take really good care of our gear. Even though things are designed so that I can replace a table leg and not the whole table, we actually don’t damage things at the rate you would expect given the heavy use. This means that everything lasts a long time, and that’s an important strategy. It shows care: our pencils are always sharp. Our markers always work. And that’s because there’s somebody here behind the scenes every week, checking all the markers and sharpening all the pencils. It also means that we need a large staff to be able to deliver programs and design in this way.
Q: What are some key considerations when selecting locations for your interventions?
A: We go everywhere at the request of community groups and partners, and we’ll go anywhere that our capacity allows. We’re not selecting locations as much as juggling capacity. If we have a bunch of requests, we’ll prioritize a neighborhood where there’s greater need. Our clients usually have a specific location in mind. For example, 34th Avenue Open Streets in Jackson Heights is a place where we work a lot. They’ll say, Can you come to this part of the street? We’d love to have you do this program. We’ve got a lot of kids that we expect that day. Then we’ll go.
Some of it has to do with where Open Streets already are, where people want them to be, who’s holding the permit for the street, which community group has stewardship of a plaza, that kind of thing. It’s at the request of the community. Sometimes, especially if it’s a one-off event, the staff will realize, Whoa, they have all our stuff, everything’s out! Sometimes it’s part of a bigger day. There might be a street closed, for example in the Bronx this past fall that was a parking day: different organizations were taking over different parking spaces. We were asked to take over a couple of parking spaces, so we brought our WRITE program and we also tested a new product. We had a new thing we were working on, and piloting it made sense for that event.
Q: Could you share a challenge you have faced in implementing a public space design and how it was overcome?
A: We use an iterative and experimental process at Street Lab. We test prototypes in place and there are always obstacles. Designs need to be durable, easy to assemble and disassemble, and reasonable for our staff to manage, and all of this is on top of the requirements to be fun and beautiful and inviting. We’ll prototype and test anything. As long as it’s safe, if we think it will be fun, we give it a try. If something’s a flop, that’s okay. I’m super thankful to be able to work in this way, to keep evaluating and testing designs as we go. Even when we think something is done, we might make adjustments. It will be out for six months and we’ll realize a detail or a change would make it better, so we’ll add it. Being free from the constraints of mass manufacturing makes change possible, you can keep making improvements.
The challenges tend to be around the location. You make something that seems sturdy and then it’s super windy and everything falls down, Okay…I guess that wasn’t quite sturdy enough. Then we fix it. It’s great to be able to do that.
We have so many ideas about things we can do. It’s mainly about figuring out what to do when and how to prioritize what we want to do. We have a rubric that we use to decide whether something should go forward, Does this follow all of the Street Lab values? Does it function for our staff and our pop-ups? Is it delivering the kind of program that we wanted to deliver? Then we prioritize. Sometimes it’s about funding, of course, as we’re a nonprofit. We have to determine, Do we have funding for this? Is this a right now plan? Then I start to sketch and design and we work as a team. Before we prototype, we look at it again and ask, Does this make sense? Is this hitting all the points on our rubric? Evaluation is challenging.
Q: How do you measure the effectiveness or success of your design interventions?
A: We get a lot of feedback. These ongoing relationships with community groups mean that people talk to us. They say, I really liked that. I didn’t like that as much as this other thing. If people continue to request a program that we’ve put out, we know that it’s working and that it’s something to build on.
We also get a lot of feedback from our staff that are out on the street. Some of that feedback is super practical, like, That thing you designed was a huge pain to put together. They’re also hearing from the people who are part of the experience, hearing what they think. They hear participants saying, This is so fun. How do I use this? This is confusing. We gather all of that feedback and use that to help us develop the program.
We did over 400 pop-ups last year, so we’re often in a lot of places at once. We can be very reactive when we see a need or an opportunity where we think we can make an impact. We just launched an outdoor cooling station. That was a reaction to the fact that we had to cancel a bunch of pop-ups over the last two summers because it was too hot. We looked at mist and plants and shade and things that make people feel cool. We didn’t have the ability to make the street cooler, but we were trying to figure out how we could make an impact. We thought, Wow, it’s getting hotter. It’s getting harder to do these kinds of late summer pop-ups. What can we do? So we started to learn about it. We learned that a lot of New York City cooling centers are only open during business hours on weekdays, so we thought that maybe we could pop up on Saturdays with this misting object and cool people down a bit. We piloted it last summer. It’s pretty fun.
When a pop-up goes well we hear, Everybody was so happy! Everybody loved it! Can you come back next week? It’s hard to evaluate design success on such a small scale. In industry people can say, we sold 20,000 of whatever, but that’s definitely not our model. It’s really about the kinds of feedback we get. If someone invites you back, you were a good guest, right? It’s hard to measure design impact through quantitative analysis. Four hundred people could come to an event and that might have nothing to do with the design. It’s hard to know what the levers are.
Q: How do you balance the need for temporary interventions with the desire for lasting impact in public spaces?
A: We return to communities over and over again. We work with community groups wanting to create new public spaces, and sometimes those temporary spaces become permanent. The now approach can kick off lasting change. At the same time, there’s nothing in the design work I do that would work as a permanent installation. It’s made to be a temporary intervention, and you can’t realistically have staff with programming out on the street 24 hours a day, every day. This is a model of programming that is immediate, a now approach: things are happening in this moment.
Our designs don’t become permanent installations but there are instances where we keep going back to a space over and over again, and we can help communities convey that they would like there to be a permanent public space through that continued programming. An example of that is on Beverly Road in Kensington. We went there repeatedly over the course of an entire season, and the community got used to that street being closed to cars. It was a positive experience and eventually everyone was involved, saying We would like this closed instead of one entity saying This street is closed and no one knows what’s going on. They did know what was going on because they initiated it. Our programs are meant to be inspirational, to give people the idea that, Hey, we can do this, too. We can make a program. We can make this street something really special.
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