As part of the Experience Design Studio, led by Northeastern professor Kristian Kloeckl and organized in collaboration with the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, a group of undergraduate students investigated people’s experience of the Emerald Necklace public park network. Based on a series of on-site interviews and observational studies, students developed design interventions with the goal to positively enhance people’s everyday experience in and around the parks.

The semester-long studio looked at public parks as places of possibility, participation and co-creation; places of destination and of escape; places for encounter; places of proximity and of distance; places for dynamic appropriation where meaning is constantly negotiated. Projects proposed by the students are material as well as digital, orchestrating objects, services, information systems, ambient installations and events.

“Developing experience design projects for the Emerald Necklace in Boston also means considering the deep design lessons of Frederick Law Olmsted who designed the park system in the late 19th century,” explained Professor Kloeckl. “Olmsted is known as a landscape architect but could by all means be considered an experience designer given his holistic and human centered approach to design. He referred to the ‘genius of place’ as the unique qualities of a site to be explored and to let them condition all design decisions of a project. The approach the students of this studio course followed was guided by an exploration of place and of how people make use of these parks over time.”

The exhibit of interventions will be at the Shattuck Visitor Center, 125 The Fenway, through December 2017. Exhibit hours are Weekdays 9 – 5, Weekends 11 – 4. For weekday visits, call ahead, as gallery is a multipurpose room and may be closed for meetings. For more information visit www.emeraldnecklace.org. Telephone 617-522-2700.