Logan Ali - Drop-In

Drop-In

designing an urban intervention to allow for user-appropriation

Park(ing) Day Installation, Fall 2022
Kent, Ohio
Designed and Fabricated in collaboration with:
Dominic Holiday, Justin Levelle, and Logan West
Independent Collaboration, Not Affiliated with Kent State University CAED
AIA Cleveland Honor Award in the Makers Category

The architectural discipline incessantly debates the relationship between form and function, and it’s understood that an object’s formal qualities prescribe a defined and intended purpose. What possibilities arise when this notion is challenged? How can design acknowledge the potential for the function to outlive its form?

Drop-In investigates these themes as a grass-roots, urban-intervention in downtown Kent, Ohio. This intervention materialized these ideas for Park(ing) Day, an international public-participatory project where people temporarily repurpose curbside parking spaces into public parklets. To accomplish this, our team partnered with a local business, Dirty Skate Co., to host the event. The installation sought to bring together a community (generally restricted in their public territory) together for a day of skating. The design consisted of a modular skate ramp that could be rearranged into four individual skate objects. Each object configuration became representative of the inherent creativity of each skater. Any prescribed function of these objects was ignored; instead, users preferred improvising strategies to approach the obstacles. With scuffs and dents as their medium, the users rendered evidence of the potential for a more vivid urban experience.