Comparisons to product design are compelling but also frustrating for architects & landscape architects. Our ‘product’ is always custom, never mass-produced; our budgets are small and shrinking; our projects are large, long-lived, and difficult to prototype. But prototyping lies at the heart of iterative design research: it allows designers to test their work not just against an abstracted model but with increasingly realized versions of the thing itself.

My design ideas for the park involved emphasizing, tweaking, twisting, and extending the existing structure, as well as expanding the park’s tradition of user modification, which allows for adaptation to changing needs.