Gowanus Gardens
Art Direction · Visual Identity · Motion
MFA Project
Gowanus Gardens is a speculative design project that imagines a future in which residents of Brooklyn's Gowanus neighborhood are forced to grow food on contaminated land.
Working with Veronica Garcia, we developed a visual world for this fictional future through research, graphic identity, posters, seed packaging, and stop-motion animation. The project uses humor and speculative storytelling to explore the tension between urban development, environmental contamination, and the rising cost of living.
We also created this satirical EPA warning poster to present what we learned.
We designed seed packets for futuristic and fictional plants that incorporated some real information on Gamma Gardens. We researched what can grow in Chernobyl and took creative liberties with the rest.
We designed stop-motion animations of our growing fictional plants to consider how our project could live in a digital space. The animations added some much-needed movement and allowed our project to feel more dynamic.
