We recently launched National Parks Now, a competition with the National Park Service which challenges multidisciplinary teams to rethink the visitor experience at four national parks in the New York region. I’m writing to invite you to apply, or to forward this opportunity to anyone you think would be interested.
As the National Park Service prepares to celebrate its centennial in 2016, the competition will generate strategies for attracting diverse audiences, telling new stories, and engaging the next generation of visitors, using these four sites as case studies for similar parks nationwide.
In November, four multidisciplinary teams will receive $15,000 to participate in a six-month research and design process to produce a broad range of experiential and engagement strategies that allow people to explore each site in more open-ended, customizable ways. At the end of this process, one winning team will receive an additional $10,000 to prototype one of their strategies, which will be implemented at their site next summer.
Teams are strongly encouraged to include expertise in fields such as architecture and landscape architecture; education; graphic, game, and interactive design; exhibition and film production; sociology, anthropology, and history; marketing and communications; and the environmental sciences. Team leads must be early career professionals with professional degrees obtained within the last ten years.
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Best,
Jerome