David J Pope

Grand Park has always served as a space for community members to gather and advocate for what matters to them. Community Signs invites members of the LA community to participate and share support and positivity through signs while at the park. The goal of this project was to engage Grand Park visitors in a way that deepens their connection with the park.

Grand Park has been home to many of Los Angele's major cultural, political, and social events. However, one of the more significant challenges Grand Park faces is balancing between supporting park visitors' voices and greater public safety. Grand Park wants to engage with its community more profoundly and significantly, but not at the cost of public safety.

Grand Park is a significant landmark to Los Angeles and its visitors. In addition, this park serves as a public square for community members to gather and advocate for what matters to them. Our solution for Grand Park needed to be inclusive and welcoming to all walks of life. Grand Park needed to maintain to be a park for everyone.

Our solution was to build a sign-making kiosk for Grand Park to be used at public events to engage the public. Our goal was to invite members of the LA community to participate and share their support through the creative process of sign making. This activity allows park visitors to express their creativity and emotions safely and in a socially acceptable way. We believe that it is critical that these messages be seen and that our community's voices are heard, so we developed a digital side to our solution to maximize their reach. We created an Instagram filter to encourage sign creators to share their community sign experience online. This digital connection allows Grand Park to spread their message of community love to thousands of people online.

The AGENDA is a dashboard device for notifications, displaying tasks and a calendar. The AGENDA lets you control what's important and brings it to you in one place. The motivation for this project was to safeguard the user's focus by allowing them to choose which notifications they get and when they receive them. Based on preset preferences, the user receives only the notifications relevant to them at the time.

The modern remote work lifestyle has inundated us with messages and notifications at all times of the day. Because of this, many people feel overwhelmed with the routine management of work and communications. Unfortunately, this unhealthy work-life balance discourages us from doing our best work by bombarding us with notifications and distractions.

Each notification we receive is an event that breaks our concentration and cumulatively wastes a great deal of time and resources. Moreover, handling all these notifications has become a job in and of itself. So we started to narrow in on a solution. How much easier would our work lives be if there was just one place we needed to check for anything important? Is there an opportunity to help workers take control of what notifications are important to them based on their current projects and priorities?

Our solution was to centralize all notifications into one location. We designed a desktop device that is a dashboard for a user's productively and notification hub. This digital device contains a suite of preferences that protects the user's privacy by choosing which notifications they want to see and when to see them. This device aims to provide workers the opportunity to focus on their work for long periods with little to no notification distractions.

Build a Bar is a unique chocolate-making experience with no limits to your sweet tooth! We set out to recreate a chocolate retail experience in a more engaging and immersive way.

Traditional chocolate retail miss opportunities to excitingly connect with customers, and shopping for chocolate has become a mundane task.

One of the driving reasons for this project was the surprising static we learned. We discovered that over 24% of U.S. adults report feeling lonely and 56% report feeling worried since the pandemic. These negative feelings can lead to serious health concerns. We believe we can address the problem by providing people an opportunity to connect again creatively. One unique way to accomplish this is by giving people the chance to make delicious chocolate together.

Our solution is to add a new area to a local chocolate shop for our Build a Bar experience. The Build a Bar experience is where visitors learn about how chocolate is made and then make a few bars themselves. They begin by selecting from various decadent dark, milk, or white chocolates. Then they choose the nuts, fruit, sweets, cookies, and salty snacks to add to their chocolate bar masterpiece. After they’re finished creating their bars, our staff moves them to a cooling station. While they wait for their bars to be ready to take home, each guest has the option of customizing the packaging they‘ll use to take their chocolate home. They can create something fun as a gift or just get creative with a bar they’re making for themselves.