Peo­ple can under­stand infor­ma­tion at so much of a higher level when they are look­ing at it visually.

Tell us what CUP (The Cen­ter for Urban Ped­a­gogy) is all about?

CUP is a non­profit, and our mis­sion is to use art, design and visual cul­ture to improve civic engagement.

There are a lot of bar­ri­ers to mean­ing­ful civic engage­ment. The part that we work on is under­stand­ing the com­plex deci­sion mak­ing sys­tems that shape the city. Things such as poli­cies, plan­ning issues, and processes that shape the com­mu­ni­ties where we live.

We col­lab­o­rate with other artists, design­ers, visual thinkers, com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions and advo­cacy groups — we bring those folks together and look at dif­fer­ent issues, try to break them down and cre­ate really acces­si­ble visual expla­na­tions, so that more peo­ple can under­stand how the sys­tems work and pro­duc­tively con­tribute to their communities.

We have two pro­gram areas: Youth Edu­ca­tion and Com­mu­nity Edu­ca­tion. In Youth Edu­ca­tion, we work pri­mar­ily with New York City pub­lic high schools. We develop in-school projects and then some after­school and sum­mer projects. All of our projects start by ask­ing a ques­tion about how the city works — like, ”Where does the water go when I flush the toi­let?” or “Who picks the food that’s in my bodega?”

Ques­tions about the neigh­bor­hoods that the stu­dents live in. These are ques­tions that we don’t know the answers to either, so as a group we inves­ti­gate the issue.

We train the stu­dents to be really good researchers, and to ask really good ques­tions. We then set up inter­views with a bunch of dif­fer­ent urban stake­hold­ers. The stu­dents get to meet with a range of peo­ple who have a lot of dif­fer­ent ideas about a given topic. Often the stake­hold­ers will all sound like they’re all say­ing pretty rea­son­able things, so the stu­dents will have to decide what shades of agree­ment they have with the dif­fer­ent peo­ple they are talk­ing to.

Where does design fit in?

As they are inter­view­ing peo­ple, the stu­dents are also work­ing with a teach­ing artist who will help them pro­duce visual work about what they are learn­ing. This is a way to help process the newly learned infor­ma­tion. At the end of the project they pro­duce a visual expla­na­tion, which they dis­play pub­licly and which we often dis­trib­ute to com­mu­nity groups who are work­ing on the same issue.

For instance, we did a project with The Acad­emy of Urban Plan­ning in Bush­wick: a trip­tych rep­re­sent­ing what the city means to dif­fer­ent people…a lit­tle girl, an old lady, a home­less per­son, and a few oth­ers. What these peo­ple saw as threats or oppor­tu­ni­ties in the neigh­bor­hood. How they would look at the kind of con­di­tions around them.

And we did a project called Sewer in a Suit­case. This project actu­ally grew out of a work­ing model made by stu­dents look­ing at the city’s com­bined sewer sys­tem in New York and how it works. You put water into it and you see how it gets pol­luted. The stu­dents made the orig­i­nal model, and it was so pop­u­lar, and enough peo­ple wanted to use it for work­shops, that we got a follow-up grant to work with a designer to pro­duce a more robust ver­sion. Now we dis­trib­ute them to envi­ron­men­tal edu­ca­tion cen­ters and schools.

So you pro­duce lots of things…posters, pam­phlets, 3D objects?

Yes, and lots of videos as well. There is a broad range of visual media that stu­dents cre­ate to share what they learned. The stu­dents who worked on Sewer in a Suit­case also worked on video called The Water Under­ground. We are also just wrap­ping up a video for the project What The Cell? Which looks at cell phone infra­struc­ture in the city.

In our Com­mu­nity Edu­ca­tion pro­gram it’s kind of the same idea. There is a visual aspect and the actual issue that we are work­ing on. In Com­mu­nity Edu­ca­tion, most of our projects are cus­tom tools that we pro­duce around spe­cific issues for an orga­ni­za­tion or a group that are really wor­ried about a par­tic­u­lar issue. They look for visual tools that can help them explain what they are work­ing on to oth­ers so they can con­tinue to do their orga­niz­ing and advo­cacy work.

For that, we have two core pro­grams. Envi­sion­ing Devel­op­ment Toolk­its – which are a series of work­shop tools that we’ve made. When they talk about neigh­bor­hood devel­op­ment issues with their con­stituents, com­mu­nity groups find that they often have to re-explain some of the more com­plex infor­ma­tion over and over again. Some of the issues are really tech­ni­cal, and they’ve asked for tools that could help them explain things more quickly, so they can get to the orga­niz­ing part.

Behind you is actu­ally one of the pro­to­types for the Afford­able Hous­ing Toolkit.

I have that book – What is Afford­able Hous­ing? It’s great!

We’re now fin­ish­ing up a new edi­tion, to be reis­sued with an updated ver­sion with updated fig­ures from the last census.

Groups run work­shops on this topic all the time. These tools help peo­ple visu­ally under­stand afford­abil­ity pro­grams and how they relate to spe­cific pop­u­la­tions in their neigh­bor­hood. It helps peo­ple get to the point where they are mak­ing sug­ges­tions for pol­icy very quickly! It is always really strik­ing when that hap­pens. Now we are doing a fol­low up toolkit that looks at zoning.

Our other big project in Com­mu­nity Edu­ca­tion is called Mak­ing Pol­icy Pub­lic. This is our poster series — which is what most peo­ple have seen.

Every year we have an open call for new top­ics; we ask com­mu­nity groups what they have been try­ing to explain to their constituents.

Then, we have a jury of two advo­cacy peo­ple and two art and design peo­ple who help us pick the next top­ics. We fol­low with a call for design­ers, and over the next year our staff will col­lab­o­rate really closely with those teams and help them pro­duce fold­out posters that explain the issue in question.

We just pro­duced our ninth one, and next we are putting one together look­ing at “Hydraulic Frac­tur­ing,” how it works and how it impacts the environment.

We are also doing another with a group called Domes­tic Work­ers United, who suc­cess­fully got some leg­is­la­tion passed last year called the “Domes­tic Work­ers Bill of Rights.” Because domes­tic work­ers do not work in a sin­gle, cen­tral­ized loca­tion, many of them don’t know about the new rules and it’s hard to get the word out to them. So we are help­ing to make this poster that can be dis­trib­uted at places like parks where the nan­nies gather and places where there are smaller gath­er­ings points of domes­tic work­ers, to spread the word.

CUP cre­ated  a really great project two years ago — a comic book guide to the juve­nile jus­tice sys­tem in New York City. When we fin­ished that one, the Depart­ment of Pro­ba­tion ordered 20,000 copies and they dis­trib­uted it directly to kids who get arrested.

That is an amaz­ing achievement!

Yes! That is one of our most excit­ing impact stories.

Why was visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion specif­i­cally cho­sen to demys­tify these urban issues?

There are a lot of aspects of visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion that are really help­ful. Visu­als mean that we are get­ting to more peo­ple. We work with a really diverse range of com­mu­ni­ties, there are often many lan­guages being spo­ken, and cer­tainly many peo­ple com­ing from dif­fer­ent read­ing lev­els. This hap­pens per­haps because they have dif­fer­ent edu­ca­tion lev­els or just a dif­fer­ent level of under­stand­ing Eng­lish because it is a sec­ond or third lan­guage to them. These are some of the most vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tions to begin with, so it becomes really impor­tant to con­vey the infor­ma­tion visually.

We also find that peo­ple can under­stand the infor­ma­tion at a higher level when they see it visu­ally, because they can under­stand the pat­terns. Peo­ple start to under­stand how the sys­tem hangs together and how a small inter­ven­tion can affect the system.

We also find that aes­thet­ics are impor­tant. We try to make things be a lit­tle bit play­ful and unex­pected. Our work has a dis­arm­ing impact and it doesn’t look like an offi­cial gov­ern­ment doc­u­ment. Peo­ple don’t approach it as they might a gov­ern­ment doc­u­ment, it makes that process a lit­tle less scary.

The project Sewer in a Suit­case is inter­est­ing because we have encoun­tered orga­niz­ers who looked at it and said, “Oh, it’s for kids.” We respond by say­ing, “Sure, if thats the way you want to look at it.”

Then we show them how it works, and they say “Oh my gosh — I have been work­ing on this issue for six months and I hadn’t totally under­stood it, until I saw this!”

Peo­ple are less afraid of these projects because they look like they are for kids. They’re not intim­i­dat­ing, and don’t expect any­thing from the viewer or user. Peo­ple don’t have to come to it with any prior knowl­edge and so they relax around the tools. That is some­thing we think a lot about — how do you get peo­ple to approach the information?

With our com­mu­nity projects, we work to get feed­back about the graph­ics by the group that will actu­ally be using them. This is great for the design­ers because they often don’t have that type of process when they are work­ing.  From there we are able to really get the work to speak to the audi­ence, because they are part of the process with us.

Stu­dents can ask ques­tions about the com­mu­ni­ties they live in, like “Who picks the food that’s in my bodega?”

That is great! Often in the design process a designer is cre­at­ing some­thing far removed from those who are actu­ally using it. To have that type of feed­back could be piv­otal in shap­ing the use­ful­ness of the final product.

When we are first start­ing a project there are so many direc­tions it could go. The designer might intend for some­thing to mean one thing, but then the audi­ence looks at it and reads it as some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent. Hav­ing feed­back from the com­mu­nity gives the designer more insight.

As you’ve men­tioned, CUP’s work deals with demys­ti­fy­ing often per­plex­ing or obscured pol­icy laid out by higher ups. Do you think these poli­cies are made to be that con­fus­ing? Is there just a lack of con­sid­er­a­tion on behalf of pol­icy mak­ers who are craft­ing poli­cies that the every­day per­son just doesn’t understand?

I think both. It depends on the specifics of the sit­u­a­tion. There are def­i­nitely times when I look at some­thing and I think that is was pur­pose­fully made to be con­fus­ing. If you look at the city’s zon­ing maps, they are really really hard to read, even for peo­ple like myself with grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion in archi­tec­ture and urban plan­ning. No one has tried to make that infor­ma­tion more acces­si­ble. We are too far into the game for that not to be on pur­pose. How­ever, some­times you will see that there are moments where the gov­ern­ment is try­ing to break things down, and they fail, pos­si­bly because they don’t have the cor­rect lan­guage. The ways that they might explain a sub­ject might not be eas­ily under­stood by those who are affected by the policies.

A lot of the indi­vid­u­als we col­lab­o­rate with for Mak­ing Pol­icy Pub­lic are lawyers. The objec­tive is to help them break through the legal lan­guage to get to an acces­si­ble lan­guage while still try­ing to main­tain accu­racy. It is a super hard task. Often we will go back and forth until we get to lan­guage that we feel every­one is happy with. It’s impor­tant to have that pre­ci­sion, it is eas­ier to just fall back on the legal jar­gon. I think a lot of times that is what is happening.

Beyond the lan­guage, there is also an acces­si­bil­ity issue. As a cit­i­zen, it is pretty dif­fi­cult to get your hands on the actual laws and the pieces of paper that say the things that affect your day to day life. We made a Mak­ing Pol­icy Pub­lic on street ven­dor reg­u­la­tions, and it is so inter­est­ing to look at the actual street ven­dor codes. There are pages and pages that say “Fifth avenue between 32nd and 33rd on the west side…etc.” This code book could sim­ply just be a two page map, but instead it is pages and pages of text about if it is ok to park your cart on any given block. You have to leaf through all these pages, which is hard for some­one to actu­ally go sit down and search through. It is not like you can take it with you and read through it at home.

On each project, there are a lot of col­lab­o­ra­tors that CUP works with – teach­ing artists, design­ers, com­mu­nity groups, pol­icy mak­ers and plan­ners – is it dif­fi­cult being so collaborative?

Yes of course! But it is great too! What makes this type of work awe­some is the chal­lenge. We work in super multi-disciplinary col­lab­o­ra­tions with diverse indi­vid­u­als com­ing with their own frame­works, goals and expec­ta­tions. It is our role to bring every­one on the same page. There are def­i­nitely times when projects go of the rails a lit­tle bit, and we are there to guide every­one in the right direction.The design process is a messy one. Design­ers know that there is that stage when things are really messy and up in the air. The other part­ners that we work with often haven’t col­lab­o­rated with design­ers before, and there comes a point when the project just feels out of con­trol. We have to show them that some­thing amaz­ing is going to come out of this process. In the end this is a new process for some peo­ple and it turns out to be really fun for them.

All of our projects start by ask­ing a ques­tion about how the city works.

How are the issues that CUP explores dis­cov­ered or chosen?

When CUP first started, it was just a group of peo­ple really inter­ested in the city, who started to do research into top­ics inter­est­ing to them.

This research often ended in exhi­bi­tions. From there they part­nered with a bunch of dif­fer­ent peo­ple, and although they liked the final exhi­bi­tions, once the show ended the use­ful life of the work that CUP pro­duced ended.

That lead us into this direc­tion. We now try to make ways in which the audi­ences and con­stituents we serve are involved in help­ing shape our pro­grams and deter­mine which top­ics we work on.

With Mak­ing Pol­icy Pub­lic we do a call for groups that have been work­ing on issues with spe­cific con­stituen­cies, then we have the jury con­sider them. We make sure that can­di­dates are groups who have really been work­ing on these issues, know about the topic, and have the capac­ity to work on a visual prod­uct that meets a real need.

Our Envi­sion­ing Devel­op­ment Toolk­its came out of infor­mal con­ver­sa­tions that we were hav­ing with groups and com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions. We then turned those orga­ni­za­tions into an infor­mal com­mu­nity advi­sory board who help us pick our next set of top­ics. Each year we do a sur­vey ask­ing orga­ni­za­tions about the big issues they have been work­ing over the year, and which issues they could use help com­mu­ni­cat­ing. From these con­ver­sa­tions we develop a sense of what is hap­pen­ing around us.

With our Youth Edu­ca­tion pro­grams we don’t really have a “client-driven” model, so to speak. The con­ver­sa­tions we have with our part­ners really drive what is on our minds. Two sum­mers ago when a lot of peo­ple were look­ing at “com­mu­nity ben­e­fit agree­ments,” there was a big city task force look­ing at how they work and whether or not we should have them. So many groups were try­ing to under­stand them at that time, so we decided to have our stu­dents cre­ate a project that looked at the issue. We always have our ear to the ground to dis­cover rel­e­vant cur­rent issues.

It’s also nice for our youth edu­ca­tion to work on prob­lems that are in the news. Stu­dents have the sense that they are con­tribut­ing infor­ma­tion to an unde­cided issue. Peo­ple take dif­fer­ent posi­tions and stu­dents see the the dif­fer­ent sides of an issue and how deci­sions get decided. Those kinds of projects have a more imme­di­ate rel­e­vance to them.

CUP projects have been awarded many acco­lades for their design and have even been exhib­ited. Is it impor­tant to have visual con­sis­tency with your projects? Are you striv­ing for an over­all aesthetic?

I guess the over­all answer would be no, because we don’t have visual con­sis­tency and we work with a lot of dif­fer­ent design­ers. Lit­er­ally every project has a dif­fer­ent designer or artist that works with us, so out­comes are pretty var­ied. Cer­tainly we art direct every­thing, and we push projects to a place where they are friendly, maybe play­ful or silly. We like the design of our projects to be unex­pected but clear and communicative.

Bring­ing design and com­mu­nity advo­cacy together is a per­fect recipe for pos­i­tive impact.

Do you think that learn­ing to work with com­mu­ni­ties and diverse groups of peo­ple is an impor­tant skill for a young designer to have?

Def­i­nitely! I think on some level work­ing with com­mu­nity groups is just like work­ing with peo­ple in gen­eral. Treat them with respect and try to under­stand the con­text they are work­ing in. It is really pow­er­ful when peo­ple come together. What CUP really tries to do is bring together peo­ple with dif­fer­ent strengths into our projects so we can pro­duce some­thing really amazing.

One thing that I see in our indus­try is that design­ers are really inter­ested in socially inno­v­a­tive work right now. Some­times they can’t fig­ure out how to pro­duce it or con­nect to a real need so they will make self-generated projects, which is totally fine. How­ever, I feel frus­trated when those projects are rewarded as hav­ing an impact, when they really are not con­nected to any real need or project.

If there are issues that you care about, there is almost cer­tainly a hand­ful of groups that work on the same issue. Go out and find them, fig­ure out what they need and see if there is a way you can help them and throw your­self into their process.

The orga­niz­ers that we work with are so good at  their work and really good at reach­ing peo­ple. And they often don’t have access to these visual tools which can make their com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing work so much more effec­tive. Bring­ing design and com­mu­nity advo­cacy together is a per­fect recipe for pos­i­tive impact.

At the end of the day what are CUP’s goals? What do you want to see hap­pen in the future of New York City?

Our vision is that our work con­tributes to social jus­tice. And our vision of social jus­tice is that more peo­ple and more kinds of peo­ple from dif­fer­ent back­grounds have more of an abil­ity to influ­ence the deci­sion mak­ing in their communities.

About Chris­tine Gaspar:

Chris­tine Gas­par has over ten years of expe­ri­ence in com­mu­nity design. Prior to join­ing CUP, she was Assis­tant Direc­tor of the Gulf Coast Com­mu­nity Design Stu­dio in Biloxi, Mis­sis­sippi, where she pro­vided archi­tec­tural design and city plan­ning ser­vices to low-income com­mu­ni­ties recov­er­ing from Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. She holds Mas­ters in Archi­tec­ture and in City Plan­ning from MIT, and a Bach­e­lor of Arts from Brown Uni­ver­sity. She’s been a CUP fan since 2001, and a staff mem­ber since 2009.

Top photo by Mau­reen Dren­nan.
CUP projects cour­tesy of CUP.