As part of our mission to create healthy and sustainable communities in underserved areas, Radian was awarded a grant from The Colorado Health Foundation to implement creative placemaking innovations in Lamar and Westwood. We teamed up with Bicycle Colorado to improve how these two communities think about and interact with nature, using our expertise in popup design.
We’ve hosted many popup events in the past, where we were cramming supplies into the back of a Prius. Each time we had an event, we had to pack and unpack the car, and we found ourselves wasting materials that weren’t sustainable because we had no where to store them. So we thought, why not create a more permanent way to store supplies and increase our capacity for popup events?
We started with a team charrette asking ourselves, “How can we take popup design on the road?”; which inspired the question, “How can we create a mobile unit to help us do popup events?”
The tiny home concept won by a landslide, and so the Tiny Wonderful was born.
A pop-up placemaking trailer that makes low cost, high impact placemaking demonstrations accessible to every community in Colorado.
Pop-up design helps users access and interact with familiar public spaces in new ways by implementing temporary installations such as:
For our partnership with Bicycle Colorado, the process, tools, and techniques we implemented with Tiny Wonderful improves how each communitiy thinks about and interacts with nature, with the desired outcome of increasing the use of parks and open space and leading to more active lifestyles and improved health.
The design and implementation process directly engages local coalitions and community members in identifying needs and solutions by collectively experimenting with temporary design solutions. Successful temporary design demonstrations will leverage work currently underway and provide additional ideas and feedback to inform future programs in even more communities throughout Denver and statewide.
Lamar: We partnered with the City of Lamar and the GOCO Inspire Initiative to improve Willow Creek Park so that it continues to be a great place to hang out and encourage residents to enjoy the outdoors. Using our Tiny Wonderful placemaking initiative, we set out to engage families and kids in Lamar in imagining what a new playground could look like, and then bringing those ideas to life using our library of pop-up materials. Learn more here.
ACTIVATE 38: We’re working with LocalWorks in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, on ACTIVATE 38, a community-led initiative to increase use and improve safety for active transportation, transit and wheelchair rolling along 38th Avenue between Kipling and Youngfield. We used the Tiny Wonderful and popup design to explore ways to make the space more pedestrian and bike friendly, and make it easier for residents in the corridor to access schools, recreation and retail.
Interested in learning more about the Tiny Wonderful or popup design? Reach out to admin@radianinc.org – we’d love to collaborate with you!
