Welcome to our website!
Our names are are Alina, Lai Wa, and Sydney, and we are first-year students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We developed this project, and we hope that you enjoy exploring our website.
Hi! I’m Alina. I’m a mechanical engineering major with a focus in learning machines and a concentration in women and gender studies. My pronouns are they/she. I come from the San Francisco Bay Area of California, and my roommate will tell you I’m a serial sock mismatcher. When I’m not doing schoolwork, you can find me painting, drawing comic strips for The Tech, tending to my tomato plants, or sewing puppets.
I’m Lai Wa. I use the she/her pronouns. I was born in Hong Kong, but moved to Brooklyn, NY when I was young. I am studying Environmental Engineering. In my free time, I like to bike around with friends, listen to music, and start new crafting projects.
Hello! My name is Sydney, and my pronouns are she/her. I’m from Katonah, New York. I’m majoring in mechanical & ocean engineering, and I’m passionate about climate advocacy and sustainability. I enjoy playing music and taking care of my succulents. When I’m not studying, you can find me building a car with the solar electric vehicle team or sailing on the Charles River.
Project Overview
The Cambridge Canopy Project was created by a team of three students for the 2.00C Design for Complex Environmental Issues class. The purpose of this exhibition is to showcase the city of Cambridge’s urban forest as a living infrastructure.
Most people would immediately think of roads, buildings, and pipelines when urban infrastructure is mentioned. Infrastructure in the traditional sense can have detrimental effects to the environment. For example, highways fragment the habitats of wildlife in the area and pavement hinders ecological processes like the water cycle. In order to address these issues, many cities across the world have begun to incorporate more vegetation or greenspaces, like parks and gardens, into their planning. These greenspaces can function as infrastructure that removes air pollutants, manages stormwater runoff, and reduces the urban heat island effect through fundamental processes, such as photosynthesis and respiration.1 A tree may need 30 years or more to develop significant canopy, but urban trees often experience shorter lifespans due to the harsh urban environment.2, 3 In 2018, the City of Cambridge began an initiative called the Urban Forest Master Plan to guide the future development of the existing urban forest canopy. Through interventions across policy, practice, design, and outreach, the City hopes to better prevent canopy loss and increase the trees’ climate resilience.
Client Profile & Problem Statement
Our team was tasked with designing an exhibit proposal centering the importance of Cambridge’s urban tree canopy. As such, our client for this initial part of the project was Jess Smith from the team working on MIT’s new Welcome Center. The Welcome Center is most likely going to see a lot of families of prospective or current students as well as members of the Cambridge community, and any exhibit we create should be accessible to a large audience that is mostly unfamiliar with the current context of the Cambridge canopy. It was also very important to us that our exhibit was accessible to those who are vision-impaired, which led to our inclusion of audible narration buttons at each panel of the exhibit. Working with Jess, we were able to refine our ideas to better fit the Welcome Center space and our audience.
Exhibit Location
This exhibit proposal is created for the Storywall in MIT’s new Welcome Center located at 290 Main St. As a part of MIT’s Kendall Square Initiative, this new Welcome Center will serve as a focal point for prospective students and their families who are visiting the Institute. The Storywall will be showcasing different projects current students are involved in.
A rendering of the Welcome Center
The Storywall comprises ten 3 feet by 7 feet pegboards and is situated in a hallway leading to the bathroom. Since the hallway is only about 8 feet wide, one of the design constraints we have is that our displays cannot protrude too far out, the widest being around 20 inches. We hope to maximize the small space we have to engage with the visitors by including an animated projection on the floor.
The Storywall comprises ten 3 feet by 7 feet pegboards and is situated in a hallway leading to the bathroom. Since the hallway is only about 8 feet wide, one of the design constraints we have is that our displays cannot protrude too far out, the widest being around 20 inches. We hope to maximize the small space we have to engage with the visitors by including an animated projection on the floor.
Dimensions of the hallway
Dimensions of the pegboards
The Cambridge Urban Forest Master Plan
The City of Cambridge started an initiative called the Urban Forest Master Plan (UFMP) in 2018 to create a data-driven, comprehensive framework for evaluating, maintaining and expanding the city’s urban forest. The task force has created several computational models predicting the effects of risk factors, like increased temperatures and invasive species, on canopy growth and projected that Cambridge’s urban forest could be cut by almost a third by 2030 if the city takes no conservation measures. The plan includes interventions across policy, practice, design, and outreach with the goal to prevent canopy loss and increase the trees’ climate resilience. The UFMP also seeks to address issues regarding environmental equity by increasing tree cover in underprivileged neighborhoods. For more information, please visit the UFMP website.
Acknowledgements
The Cambridge Canopy team would like to thank our instructors Ari Epstein, Joel Grimm, and Libby Hsu for their guidance throughout this project. We'd also like to thank Laura Tenny and Jess Smith for their insight, advice, and for being there for us when our project changed direction mid-semester. Our team would also like to thank our Undergraduate Teaching Fellows Isa Chiurillo and Juliana Strother for their patience and encouragement each and every class. Lastly, thank you to Elise Chambers for giving us this website as a platform to share our work.
Works Cited
[1] Pataki, D. E., Carreiro, M. M., Cherrier, J., Grulke, N. E., Jennings, V., Pincetl, S., … Zipperer, W. C. (2011). Coupling biogeochemical cycles in urban environments: ecosystem services, green solutions, and misconceptions. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 9(1), 27–36. https://doi.org/10.1890/090220]
[2] The City of Cambridge Urban Forest Report: Healthy Forest, Healthy City. (2020, September). Retrieved from https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/publicworksdepartment/Forestry/healthyforesthealthycity.pdf
[3] Stormwater Trees Technical Memorandum. (2016). Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-11/documents/final_stormwater_trees_technical_memo_508.pdf