Friday, August 12, 2016: 10:30 AM
Grand Floridian Blrm G, Ft Lauderdale Convention Center
William R. Burnside, National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), Annapolis, MD
Background/Question/Methods: Designed experiments are an innovative vehicle for meeting design, ecological, and civic goals (Felson & Pickett 2005). One project at ESA 2015, Baltimore’s Harlem Park inner block parks, involves potential treatment and redesign of similar interior parks that effectively constitute repeated socio-ecological elements. These parks, each surrounded by unique blocks of homes, varied in the preferences of community members for different potential treatments, such as increasing or decreasing street access. This difference and our desire to honor it suggested an intriguing modification to top-down design experiment choices or unitary treatments. The nature of potential treatments could be primarily ecological, primarily social, or, ideally, socio-ecological, such as park accessibility, and hence active human use, affects biodiversity, rainwater infiltration, or nitrogen runoff. Situations might also allow for assessing the relationship between people’s traditions and memories of past urban land use, or social-ecological memory (Barthel et al. 2010), and both such preferences and states pre- and post-design. I explore this idea with potential examples.
Results/Conclusions: The use of community preferences to inform designed experiments is the convergence and evolution of two parallel strands of ecologically-relevant design practice. Designed experiments with treatments and controls have been used successfully at the EPA-affiliated Shepherd’s Creek Watershed Project, among others. Community preferences increasingly inform landscape designs in a number of cities. Using community preferences to vary treatments as part of a designed experiment’s methodology will promote civic community engagement, an explicit benefit and goal of htis approach (Felson & Pickett 2005). I conclude that such emergent designed experiments serve a double purpose, providing a mechanism for a) a more-diffuse (e.g. multi-site) design explicitly incorporating the existing social environment and b) for seeding a virtuous cycle in which preferences affect outcomes which could feed back to affect future choices. This modification also provides alternative targets for designed experiments, ones that do not necessarily fit the typical single-site model.
