Written By
Scott Page, Principal
February 24, 2021
2020 Year in Review
Interface Studio would like to recognize and celebrate the adaptability and innovation we found in our team, our partners, our clients, and the communities we had the opportunity to work in in 2020. From distancing our community engagement, to crafting COVID-19 economic recovery strategies, to learning how to collaborate from afar, the last year pushed us to experiment and expand our existing skills.
When outdoor public spaces became even more important for socializing-while-distant, changing up our environments, and getting active, we created a guide of ways to play safe during COVID-19, illustrated by Maria.
In MidTown Cleveland, we designed our engagement strategy as a digital and socially-distanced experience. Sarah had the chance to Pop Up in person at the local supermarket and we rolled out virtual focus groups, a community survey, a digital collaborative map, and two well-attended public events online.
In Detroit, we created Plan Packs with information, a survey, and coloring pages that our community partners delivered door-to-door, and survey drop boxes to get back the completed surveys.
Here in our hometown of Philadelphia, we had the opportunity to work on a COVID-safe community engagement plan for the City of Philadelphia’s Rebuild program.
We continue our work in Downtown Fall River, MA, where the original action plan is now a recovery plan building on research we developed as a side project while our heads were collectively spinning from the emerging impacts of the pandemic.
And in a year that needs this kind of work more than ever, we completed the Equitable Economic Development Strategy for St. Louis along with our master plan for Downtown St. Louis. The issues of race, health, access to opportunity and economic recovery are central to this work.
Thank you to everyone who continues to support us and our work. We went from two remote workers at the start of 2020 (Stacey in Brooklyn and Sarah in Chicago) to twelve in mid-March. Meetings turned into Zooms, Gchat became our water cooler, and birthday celebrations got more creative. Finally, through the pandemic, we welcomed an Interface Studio baby boom with 4 new babies - congratulations to Yoona, Ben, and Jamie (twins!!)!