IDSA Western District Conference Charrette

The 2008 IDSA Western District Conference blew into town this weekend bringing over 250 design professionals and students to Portland. The weather held out somehow, giving us a beautiful night for Saturday's rooftop party at Hotel Delux (and fooling all the out-of-staters into thinking Portland is pleasant and warm in the spring).

On Sunday, the University of Oregon Product Design Program hosted a design charrette in our new White Stag building. The charrette theme was thinking about ways cars and bikes can coexist in urban environments. Our enthusiastic presenter, Greg Raisman of Portland's Office of Transportation, gave the group some background on Portland's growing bicycle community and the challenges of transportation design that suits both cars and bikes before turning us loose to design better street bike parking areas and traffic calming zones. Students, design professionals, and guests from PDOT, SCRAP, and BikePortland.org started sketching and after 30 minutes we had a lively review of the design proposals.

Everything from better speed bumps to beautified bike racks were proposed and Greg helped the designers understand some of the different financial and physical constraints faced by the city. Clearly, this is a subject that deserves more design attention and some of us are looking forward to partnering with PDOT on future projects that could be implemented in several of Portland's design districts. More about that soon...

In the meantime, thank you to all of the sponsors and volunteers, including Greg Raisman, Sarah Figliozzi and Mark Lear of PDOT, Teri Thomas Petersen of SCRAP, Jonathan Maus of BikePortland.org, Bill Stites, and Janna Kimel and Steve Chaney of IDSA Oregon.