OpenIDEO - OpenIDEO Team Notes - Announcing our Vibrant Cities Challenge Top 20

Field Notes

Inspiring content from across OpenIDEO & IDEO's other work.

Jan 4th 2012
Announcing our Vibrant Cities Challenge Top 20

What kinds of vibrancy learnings might we collect by prototyping the Dialog-Booster! concept and placing two chairs outside during the Refinement phase?

Welcome to our Vibrant Cities Challenge Refinement phase! It's been a collaborative and fun journey so far, with December's Concepting phase overflowing with your bright ideas and smart builds.

Throughout the challenge the OpenIDEO team has worked with a great group of Detroit and revitalisation advisors, including Libby Ferin from Steelcase and David Berthy from IDEO's Chicago office, to plan and manage our collective efforts. This week we met with Libby and David to review all of your concepts and choose our Top 20 shortlist. Trust us, this was no easy decision! With so many concepts poised to restore vibrancy in Detroit and other struggling cities, we had our work cut out for us.

To help choose our Top 20 concepts, we took a few factors into consideration:

We first tallied up all of your applause and took stock of which concepts seemed to grab the community's attention. This helped us identify the concepts you were most excited and passionate about.

Next we considered how well each concept addressed our challenge question and the evaluation criteria we announced earlier in the challenge. By reviewing each submission according to the resources it would require, its plans for implementation, and its ability to scale across cities, we created a diverse list of ideas both big and small.

Speaking of big and small, we also wanted to develop a Top 20 that included both big concepts for large-scale revitalization and smaller acts for local vibrancy. Some of our Top 20 will take time, money and partnerships to design and prototype, while others could be implemented today by any of us. Impact does come in all shapes and sizes, after all!

Finally, we considered how each concept might evolve during Refinement. As you'll see, each of the Top 20 is in its own stage of development. Whether it's by building on and adding your suggestions via comments, or taking a concept and trying it out in your community, your input and feedback will be crucial to help these ideas grow during our Refinement phase.

So with that, we hope that every member of our OpenIDEO community will join Refinement to help position these ideas for even more impact.

We'd also like to recognize our Honorable Mentions for this challenge:

A Tool Library at City Hall by CJ Adams

Brownfield Eliminator App/wiki/map/calendar by Johan Löfström

Change a Space Overnight by Alana Aviel

Collaborative Consumption in a Repurposed Carpark by Bernise Ang

Community Meet and Greet by Jennifer Wang

Community Resource Mapping and Web Interface by Michael Jones

Evolver: An accelerator for social enterprises by Ciara Byrne

Made in Our Streets by Jean-Luc Alfonsi

Please Loiter by Mike McDearmon

TEDxLocal Gov by Charlotte Fliegner

Congratulations to our Top 20 shortlist and the teams that worked on them! Head over to the Refinement phase to check them out and join the conversation. But don't delay: Refinement only lasts until Wednesday, January 11th at 11am PST! After that, we'll move into the Evaluation phase, with the winning concepts announcement on January 19th.

Cheers,

The OpenIDEO Team

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Field Notes

Inspiring content from across OpenIDEO & IDEO's other work.

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Jan 4th 2012
Announcing our Vibrant Cities Challenge Top 20

What kinds of vibrancy learnings might we collect by prototyping the Dialog-Booster! concept and placing two chairs outside during the Refinement phase?

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Where people design better, together

Field Notes

Inspiring content from across OpenIDEO & IDEO's other work.

Recent blog entries

Jan 4th 2012 Announcing our Vibrant Cities Challenge Top 20

What kinds of vibrancy learnings might we collect by prototyping the Dialog-Booster! concept and placing two chairs outside during the Refinement phase?

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Jan 4th 2012
Announcing our Vibrant Cities Challenge Top 20