In collaboration with the HOPES Conference (Holistic Options for Planet Earth Sustainability), which was established in 1994 by UO architecture, landscape architecture, and art students eager to direct their design education. Each year, HOPES provides a platform for students, professionals, leaders, and activists to engage in rich discussions on sustainable solutions to contemporary issues. FBD partnered with the HOPES Conference to host a workshop at the Urban Farm in alignment with the theme of Transpecies design. Attendees heard a presentation about Mason Bees and recent research by grad students in design for bumblebee habitats and then had the chance to design their own Mason Bee Hotels to be built on the Urban Farm. Harper Keeler gave us a tour of the bee hotels currently at the Urban Farm, as well as the honeybee boxes. Mason Bee Houses use round tubes, like bamboo shoots, that allow Mason Bees to burrow inside and lay eggs. This workshop focused on designing Bee Hotels which were eye-catching for the bees and created habitats for this very important species. 

In collaboration with Stay on the Grass, a non-profit started by UO Alumni, FBD hosted three parklet prototypes in Lawrence Hall at UO, accompanied by a talk with the founder of Stay on the Grass titled “Lessons Learned from Starting Our Own Design-Build Non-Profit”. The presentation was followed by a pizza/happy hour with the SOTG team for students to ask Ryan questions. Students and faculty continued to interact with the parklets and learn more after the parklets were moved to 5th Street Alley in Eugene. Stay on the Grass is a design-build nonprofit started by UO SAE Alum Ryan Al-Schamma which “reclaims expansively paved areas and creates green space for those who need it most”. Originally started as a DIY for others to build their own parklets, after some test runs in the Pearl District and 5th Street Market, both the City of Portland and 5th Street showed interest in hosting more of these parklets and the team has shifted from a DIY product to one that can be fabricated and sold to cities to bring more green space to paved areas. Our goals are to promote the reclamation of green space and educate students on starting a design-build nonprofit after graduation. Access to green space is a serious barrier for many communities, and by holding an educational event and working with community partners such as Stay on the Grass, we are addressing both environmental and educational barriers. 

With housing being such a crisis right now, our group wanted to focus on projects geared towards transitional housing solutions. To that end, Freedom by Design UO hosted a design charrette event centered around on creating solutions that were small, resilient, and affordable in order to get us thinking about how a project might be conceived on a real site. For this exercise we were using a church in Portland that is looking to host shelters and the focus was both on the shelter and the site design. This was the first in-person design event that we held after the campus started to open up and it was so good to be back designing collaboratively again! Designs from this event are going to be further analyzed for similarities and key strategies in order to synthesize the ideas into a possible real build project in the future.