The LA River
a holistic solution
Challenge
Identify a way to improve the Los Angeles River so that it can enhance the lives of those involved.
Outcome
A self-sustaining lighting system to increase safety and rest stops to meet unmet needs. Along with insights to further efforts to assist the homeless.
Research & Insights
Given the open-ended nature of our challenge, my team and I started with a visit to the site to begin understanding the ecosystem in the LA River. An afternoon and plenty of walking later, we discovered that this particular site of the LA River exhibited a diverse environment and set of people. We mapped our findings onto a psychographic map of the environment and people.
We discovered the site is daily occupied by: oil line workers, municipal workers, commuters, recreational users, and homeless people.
We then proceeded by interviewing each type of occupant to understand their daily experience on the LA River, what their objectives where, and what where the pain points of their day. After a dozen interviews spanning the different groups, common themes within each group began to emerge and helped form the following personas and user journeys. From our journey maps, we discovered that each group experienced unique challenges that stemmed from the other occupants.
Homeless people faced unsafe situations and felt subjected to harm from other homeless people or municipal workers.
Municipal workers disliked having to clean after homeless people and were slowed down by stubborn commuters.
Commuters felt endangered by the lack of railing next to the slopes and disliked pollution other occupants.
Recreational users experienced exhaustion by the lack of water or shade available, and they felt unsafe once the sun set.
Oil workers visited the site once or twice a month and their needs were not researched further.
Design Principles
From our findings we created the following design considerations to guide our exploration into solutions.
Self-Sustainability: the solutions should not require the construction of additional infrastructure
Multi-Faceted: the solutions must be able to serve more than one user group
Helping Hand: the solutions should enable users to more easily meet their goals along the site
Generating Concepts
To have a better chance of implementing our solutions, we investigated the public initiatives being put forward by the city of Long Beach. Through our research, we discovered the following initiatives that could help fund the construction of our solutions.
Solution Delivery
A rest stop. This multi-purpose rest stop would provide solutions of the issues experiences across users. It would provide:
a resting area and restroom for exhausted commuters and recreational users
a safe space for pedestrians to stand when approached by municipal vehicles on route to sites needing their attention
a place for users to dispose waste that is currently being tossed in the environment surrounding the LA River
Safety Lighting System. The site currently lacks any lighting along the path, which poses a major safety concern for pedestrians. Beyond light, this system would:
discourage criminal activity currently supported by the lack of light in the area
prevent the drowning of homeless inhabitants by alerting those in the area that the tunnels will expel their loads or the expected flooding of the river during rainy seasons
Closing Thoughts
While solving the larger social issue of homeless was beyond the scope of the project, our findings revealed that the first step in helping homeless people off the LA River is to improve the relationships between the city of Long Beach civil servants and the homeless people.
By doing so, homeless people would feel comfortable putting themselves in the hands of pubic services meant to lift them out of homelessness.