Teammates: Xiangbin Cai, Guang Feng, Siyu Zeng
Focus—Static mapping and observation in skatepark (Sydenham Green Skate Park )
posted by Xiangbin Cai
In week 2, we took an excursion to visit the skatepark at Sydenham for observing and analyzing the environment and the players inside the park.
We stayed there in the afternoon from 2:40pm to 4:50pm.
In the first place, we took different perspectives to look around the whole layer of the park and then decided to sit down on one side of the park.
Here are three purposes for our observation:
- observe the basic shape and space layout of the skatepark
- Identify the types of the player to see which one takes most part in the skatepark
- Analyzing the common lines and trajectories of the skaters, also their movement and tricks.
Part1–
Pictures below show the rough space mapping from a plan view to the skatepark:
Form the picture above, we discovered something interesting and helpful for our initial design progress.
We notice that the two long glide path crossing the whole park are the busiest line, which means have the highest utilization rate. In addition, as the note and the marks that we add on the tracing paper, the speed of skaters on these two lines are faster than others. Also, these dashed area indicates the do-tricks zones which also show their failure zone when they practice their tricks.
Basically, the skaters are mostly male and we only saw one female that day, and the most players were teenagers and kids. In fact, the skaters dominated the whole park obviously and only one kid riding his scooter and practising his tricks in the middle zone.
There are two rest area on the left side and the right side where skaters start to skate around, especially on the left side near the tall building, there is a circle zone next to it, and only one skater will play in it each time.
There is something we discovered that, on that sunny day, quite a few pedestrians stopped and watched skaters playing and one lady brought her younger son to watch his brother playing. In addition, the skatepark is really close to the main road and one basketball court just right behind it.
Part2–
Except the space mapping, we also captured the movement of some skaters while they were playing tricks through photos and videos, and these materials will be analyzed further and documented to help the next step of our design process.
Also, during the observation, we took the videos and drew the movement of one skater doing the specific trick from a front view, below is the picture of the sketch:
As we can see from the sequence of the typical movement, we discovered that skaters always have to try their best to balance their body before and after the trick, and the preparation for the trick draw audience most attention which brings us some thoughts.
Below there are some screenshots of the videos we took:
Based on the observation and information collection we did in week 2, in order to push our design progress forward, as our teachers suggested, we still have more research to do behind the skatepark, the skaters and the skateboard。
Playful Cities 