Key to Community Input in Seattle: Waterproof Tags

Pioneer Square is sometimes billed as Seattle’s original neighborhood, and the once-beating heart of the city has been a popular spot since it was founded in 1852. The Alliance for Pioneer Square, a non-profit whose goal it is to improve and advocate for the area, was searching for public input and desires for updates to the neighborhood. The solution, brainstormed by The Young Architects Forum of the American Institute of Architects in conjunction with the Pioneer Square Alliance, was an initiative called Map the Square.

After searching for an effective way to empower the public to give feedback on improvements to the square, AIA architect Rob Deane said the group stumbled across Relyco’s (Booth 3055) REVLAR and decided the weatherproof, easy-to-print on, and vibrantly colored synthetic paper was perfect for creating the kind of waterproof tags the group envisioned for Pioneer Square.

How Map the Square used waterproof tags

During the Seattle Design Festival, a two-week event that draws a ton of residents downtown, festival-goers were instructed to head to one of several kiosks located around Pioneer Square. The kiosks were populated with colorful waterproof REVLAR tags that designated different uses like art installations, restrooms, and dog parks. People could tie those tags to locations where they wanted to see those attractions, and The Young Architects Forum then went out into the neighborhood to find the hundreds of placed tags. Afterwards, they created an interactive map based on those tags, which they plan to present to the Alliance for Pioneer Square to inform future improvements and changes to the square.

The benefits for Map the Square

• The waterproof paper could be easily cut into tags
• Tags could hold up to Seattle’s notoriously rainy weather
• Prominent, bright colors allowed easy tagging and recognition
• Project served as a blueprint for future, similar initiatives, both inside Seattle and beyond
• The ability to print and customize tags for the campaign.