What Do Resilience and the Red Sox Have in Common?

Both have come up within my first two weeks at Massport.

Part of my Fellowship proposal involves building a website that can serve as a resource for resilience.  I’m excited to report that instead of hosting this website on an external server, I’m adding a new section on resilience to Massport’s official website.  These resiliency webpages will probably go live sometime next month and I’ll continue updating the site until my internship ends.

DRAFT: Resiliency Website Homepage

Creating these webpages involves finding content to populate the pages with.  While researching resilience I’ve found more and more designers working within this emerging field.  Resilient design was in the news recently, when six winners of the international “Rebuild by Design” competition were announced.  The winning proposals include projects by BIG and by OMA: http://www.archdaily.com/512516/oma-wins-rebuild-by-design-competition-with-resist-delay-store-discharge/

I’ve also come across resilient design work happening in the Netherlands.  Dutch designers are well known for their seawalls and are leaders in designing for water.  Their responses to resilient design challenges can be very poetic: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681986/this-dutch-sand-engine-uses-natures-destructive-power-to-protect-from-flooding

I’ve been helping to organize a Resiliency Speaker Series.  I designed a poster for our Summer Series, which includes a speaker from Sasaki’s Urban Studio.  Within the first few days of advertising the event we received so many RSVPs that we had to consider booking an alternate venue, in case our original room was too small!

Poster Design: Resiliency Speaker Series, Summer 2014

I’ll finish this blog post off with what might be my favorite image of all:David Ortiz at our meeting this week.  Photo taken by Monica VanAsselberg. 

We had a meeting this past Monday for all of Massport’s employees.  They played music by Avicii, Imagine Dragons and Pharrell, there was a line of food trucks and an airplane decorating the hangar that the event was held in—it was unlike any work meeting I’ve been to before.  But the real surprise was the special guest—David Ortiz, a.k.a. Big Papi from the Red Sox!

The meeting must have been good luck, because the Red Sox won their game against the Minnesota Twins later that night.

–Adria