An Intergenerational Public Art Initiative for Alameda

Overview

Generations in Color is a proposal to the Alameda Arts Commission for a framework that pairs experienced local artists with young people to collaboratively design and paint public artwork across the city, beginning with utility boxes.

Rather than presenting the idea as a static PDF, I designed and built it as an interactive, narrative-driven website — so commissioners and stakeholders could explore the proposal at their own pace, or follow a guided walkthrough structured like a five-part story.

The Problem

Public art proposals are usually pitched as documents: a PDF, a deck, a stack of renderings. That format struggles to convey something this initiative depends on — that the process (mentorship, collaboration, shared learning) matters as much as the finished murals.

• →A flat document can't distinguish the framework's five movements — Discover, Learn, Collaborate, Create, Grow — from a list of unordered features
• →Reviewers skim; a linear deck buries the framing before the ask
• →The proposal needed to work for two audiences at once: commissioners reviewing it in five minutes, and stakeholders reading it closely

Key Insight

Treating the proposal itself as a designed artifact — not just its contents — was the real product problem.

• →Structuring the 20 sections into five narrative phases let people either browse freely or follow a guided, slide-by-slide story
• →A "digital companion" concept for the murals themselves — QR-code plaques linking to each artwork's story — reinforced the initiative's real subject: relationships, not paint
• →A working print/PDF export meant the interactive site never became a liability for reviewers who still wanted a document

Approach

System Thinking

The proposal itself is organized around the same four pillars it asks the Commission to fund:

Status

Generations in Color is a live proposal, not a completed program. The pilot figures — 8–10 utility boxes, 6–8 artists, 8–16 youth participants — are explicitly framed as preliminary, pending collaboration with the Arts Commission, city staff, and community partners.