Designing Third Places in South Dakota

January 19th, 2009 by Lindsey Karlson

What do architects, landscape architects, city planners, engineers, and community development professionals have in common? No, this isn’t a trick question or the opening line of a joke. The answer comes once or twice a year, through an informal organization called Design: South Dakota. For three days, a team of design professionals (including the disciplines listed above) come to a small town in South Dakota to help the community gather and illustrate local dreams for the future. You can read more about what a Design:SD visit entails at their blog, www.designsd.org.

Designing in Deuel

Last Thursday evening in Clear Lake, South Dakota, Design:SD team members shared what the community can expect from the Design:SD charrette that is coming to their community March 26-28, 2009. The regional community (the charrette will include the communities of Clear Lake, Gary, and the rural areas in

Deuel County) was chosen as the next Design:SD community in Fall 2008, after the community expressed interest and design team members agreed it would be a good fit.

For now, I’d like to share a bit of information related to third places that emerged in the conversation last evening. During the interactive session of the night, we asked those in attendance to talk with one another about what they would like the design team to consider specifically. We were lucky enough to have a contingent of high school girls join us for the meeting. They added great energy and excitement to the meeting, along with a bunch of really great ideas.

Among their ideas included a place for teens to hang out. Now, this is a common request from parents and young people alike, but I took the opportunity to dig into what they really meant by a place to ‘hang out.’ They described a place where they could come and go as they wanted, play Rockband on the Wii, have a smoothie, get online, do homework, and just relax. What they essentially described was a third place.