Sound the Mound was launched in 2016 in the Transdisciplinary Design Program at Parsons School of Design and continues to evolve through a series of courses in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons. Our goal is to work with our students and our partners to generate projects that culminate with the public opening of the first phase at Freshkills Park in 2020.
The partnership with Freshkills Park and Arable, a remote monitoring technology developed for crop management helped translate environmental data into unique sensory experiences to allows visitors to explore aspects of the park remotely or on site, culminating into three different student projects exploring solutions that encourage community engagement and improved sustainability practices.
Sound the Mound is a collaboration between partners who are either directly or indirectly contributing to a data-driven public art installations, public exhibitions that highlight how our actions impact our ecosystems, and high school workshops that help ninth graders learn the importance of becoming more sustainable. Each partner is essential to this project.
The collaboration with Gaynor McCown and Freshkills aims to collectively engage all partners in a co-creation process that involves designing and testing experiential learning activities that bridge the siloed curriculum in today’s school system.