Tag Archives: Innovation

Welcome back to Gehl Institute’s partnership with Untapped Cities in New York, looking at the impact of data, both open and collected, in the design of cities.

On March 7, New York City became the first local government to pass legislation ensuring public access to data. The passing of the bill symbolizes a political embrace of the “open” culture already underway in New York City’s “Silicon Alley.” City agencies and non-profit organizations in New York are making new correlations between urban conditions and social phenomenon, utilizing crowdsourcing and open data, to support traditional methods of data analysis.

Open Plans, a New York-based non-profit organization with a focus on transportation and urban planning, is an example of such a progressive group. The Open Plans team builds software which enables public agencies and non-profit organizations to crowdsource input from the community. You may recognize their work with New York City’s Department of Transportation’s interactive bike station suggestion map from this past year. In its decade of existence, Open Plans developed open source projects which include OpenGeo, Streetfilms, Streetsblog, GothamSchools, Civic Commons and OpenTripPlanner. According to the non-profit, all the tools serve to facilitate open source software, information transparency and progressive transportation planning.

Recently, Open Plans co-hosted a panel at the American Planning Association (APA) Conference in Los Angeles with Denver-based firm Place Matters, highlighting the challenges to come as we navigate amidst a constant and sometimes overwhelming flow of data. Important questions loom: How do we make sense of the data? With limited resources, should companies focus on making the quality of data better or the analysis tools better?

Publicly submitted requests for bike share stations in NYC

In partnership with Open Plans, the NYC Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) has also embraced this trend towards a more “open” culture by utilizing crowd-sourced information to plan station locations for the soon-to-be-launched Citibank bike share program. Bicycle commuting has increased in the city (35% from 2007 to 2008), but there are still significant challenges associated with bike ridership, including access. The collected crowd-sourced data, submitted via an interactive map on the NYCDOT website, allowed the public to suggest bike share stations for the rollout.

To read the full article visit Untapped Cities

Workspace Spirit – Creating a culture rich in knowledge and innovation

By Emmy Laura Perez Fjalland

November 9, 2011

Heroes, News

Leave a Comment

On September 15^th we experienced a “method day”. Vannesa Ahuactzin, Cultural Planner at Gehl together with David Carlson, founder of Designboost, planned and facilitated the day.

The method days happens twice a year. They are a meant to bring the Gehl Office together to discuss relevant topics. This method day was about discovering ways to build a mindset of knowledge gathering and innovative practices within.

+Why is it important for office to experience a method day?

We travel a lot and work independently in many ways. This time of coming together to discuss, put our minds on a topic together for a whole day, is very valuable to the people who work at Gehl. It is about pushing the boundaries and developing new ways to gather and approach knowledge.

Beginning the day with Vannesa's beautiful illustrated ideas

+Why explore the theme of knowledge and innovation?

Knowledge is important to our business. We focus on changing knowledge to innovation. The core of the day was to understand how we can find new knowledge, how we work together and apply knowledge to our projects and thinking. Knowledge is a strange thing; it is nothing and everything, it is everywhere and nowhere. In fact it is very much here [we are talking together by the yellow table at the office library], but it doesn’t mean anything until someone uses it. What’s interesting is trying understanding that mental and practical process of changing knowledge to innovation, and by having this method day, we can go deeper into this topic.

Discussing ideas - David is as always very passionate

A group went to the café downstairs to explore and discuss their ideas

+The day was planned as a workshop – Why do you think this structure was fruitful in dealing with this specific theme?

Workshops are about bringing people together to discuss different matters or themes. The success lies in our ability to create an environment of openness that allows the participants to freely express their ideas. But it is also crucial to create a sense of expectation and to push the boundaries of what people already know. When they get tired, they get more honest. From the beginning of the day we made our expectations and gave the participant’s parameters to produce their ideas. We divided the day into smaller working groups, had two working sessions with presentations and discussions. By doing this you take the temperature of the discussion – how is it going? And it gets more dynamic and exhausting J

Gathered after workshops and putting our ideas on the boards

+What came out of it?

Lots of good ideas that we can keep pushing forward. Innovation is like a cake: You are continuously building up the layers. The method day brought a lot of the ingredients and layers, but we are still working on making the rest of the cake. Sometimes the actual answers that come out of the day – the well-worked sheets themselves – are not the most interesting output. It’s was behind them, the interpretations of the presentation, the small comments, seeing how the behavior changes. Going beyond the unexpected.

Emmy: For me the most unexpected was that innovative practices are about the workspace culture. It is about how people at the company work together and how they share their knowledge. Vannesa: It is about how children are taught to share. Are they hiding their findings from each other or are they open? Are they willing to discuss before the unfinished? If you want to be innovative, you must break the practices and change the minds by coming together and pushing the boundaries. Basically creating a culture where people take up something and change it into something new.

The 21st Century Campus

By jeffrisom

June 14, 2011

Research, Uncategorized

1 Comment

Gehl Campus is a new venture. Well, it’s new in the sense that the campus, precinct, quarter, or whatever, is the focus; but orthodox in that it is a logical outflow from the Gehl approach as urbanists of the humanist persuasion.

To us, the campus is defined broadly, as any physical configuration of buildings and spaces, public or collegial, that draws people together into creative networks for learning, discovery and exchange. So a university or the like clearly fits the bill; but so does a hospital complex, or a business precinct, a research and technology park, a cultural complex, a civic zone – indeed any clustering of human functions that share and intermix common roots and values.

The campus, then, is the city in microcosm.

It has all the richness of interaction, the creative tension and, potentially all the living amenity of the city. Many urban campuses are actually part of the city that contains them. They are essential investments of the local economy and increasingly part of the brand of the city in its global context.

And just as there are cities that are lively, safe and engaging – so too are there campuses that have a ‘buzz’; campuses that encourage the sharing of knowledge amongst peers, departments, industry and the broader city, campuses where we want to stay longer.

Over the coming months, Gehl Campus blog posts we will explore some of the ways we might build a culture of exchange on Campus and how public life and knowledge exchange can be designed in to modernize campuses for the way innovation takes place in the 21^st Century. Watch this space.

Professor Daryl LeGrew (pictured) and Simon Goddard, The Campus Project.