SWEET HISTORY ON AUBURN
The Sweet Auburn Historic District’s namesake stems from the mile and a half long Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, GA. Once the “richest Negro street in the world” lined with successful black- owned businesses and the center of the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Sweet Auburn has fallen on hard times due to lack of investment and abandonment over the last few decades.
Our project is designed to aid in the revitalization and preservation efforts that are again reshaping the face of Sweet Auburn.
PROBLEM SPACE
As a group, we wanted to reinforce the spirit of the community by bringing attention to the historical significance of Auburn and encouraging visitors, residents, and business owners to interact with these rich pieces of history together.
While some names of the Civil Rights movement, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, are world renowned, there are many other historical people and places of the Civil Rights movement that remain unknown, even on Auburn. We wanted to highlight many of these unfamiliar histories throughout the street in our project.
The video below explains more about the media strategy we developed, including an example of the layers of interaction while visiting Auburn.
Video - Sweet History on Auburn
PROCESS
The current wayfinding method to help visitors explore Auburn's history is a series of plaques that are placed along the avenue. While this highlights key historical landmark buildings, they are stationary, and require visitors to remember all of the important locations as they walk along the street.
In order to address this, we wanted to have information that was readily available to you as you peruse the Auburn District, which led us to creating posters that could be placed along the street, allowing visitors access to updated information as they walk by.
Our alternate approach of finding your way around Auburn is comprised of three components: to notice the hidden history, learn about the stories and significance, and interact with the local community.
One of the first steps in our work was to go to Auburn Avenue, where we were given a tour and researched the area on our own. After a few iterations on poster designs exploring connections to the political and historical context of the highway (i-85), we noticed on one of our trips the sidewalk paving tiles were hexagons, and as you leave the main avenue the sidewalk returns to traditional concrete.
This was the beginning of inspiration for our design, informing our design language to fit with the space as we moved forward with the project.
Notice
The first layer of interaction we designed was to allow visitors to notice the sometimes-hidden history of Auburn, highlighting key historic business, shops, museums, and churches central to the Civil Rights Movement and broader history. One example is the Madame C.J. Walker museum, which honors the first woman to become a self-made millionaire in America. The shop is now home to historical artifacts and the W.E.R.D. radio station.
Learn
The second layer of interaction was for users to learn more about the history around them, such as with one mural a block away from the iconic John Lewis mural. This mural depicts an advertisement with the Gold Dust Twins, who were racist caricatures used as part of a late 19th-early 20th century advertising campaign for washing powder. We created an informative poster that gives some background on the mural, as well as hexagonal pieces to paint on the ground and attract the attention of people walking from either direction.
This stage allowed us to provide information to people who want to learn more, emphasizing the shared history of the space and it's impact in shaping US history.
Interact
The final stage for visitors is to interact with the space and people of Auburn to become more than just a visitor, but a stakeholder in Auburn’s future.
We encouraged this interaction with a digital projection that would sketch an outline of the viewer through a Kinect interface, while also displaying pertinent information about the specific location.
For our ideation of this, we chose the Daily World Building, an an example of helping people realize the stories of the space that they are stepping into - for example, it was once home to the first successful black-owned newspaper in the U.S.
MY ROLE
Our team worked closely together on all aspects throughout the entire project, however my main role was in ideation and design of the interactions, as well as the visual design of the posters. Additionally, I documented and created the video for our project.
FUTURE STEPS
The final presentation of this project involved responses from Sweet Auburn community members and business owners, all of whom provided great feedback with suggestions and highlighting the benefits of this project being implemented into their community.