Wanderland NYC - A Community Garden Scavenger Hunt

New York, Lower East Side, USA

By Sofia Kavlin
urban play, alternate reality gamification, puerto rican heritage, activism, community gardens

Wanderland is a scavenger hunt using a Felt collaborative map to track participant's movements in real time.

Wanderland NYC - A Collaborative Mapping Project & Scavenger Hunt with Community Gardens in Loisada

The final goal of this project was to co-design an alternate reality game with community gardeenrs from Green Thumbs garden network. There were two game spaces using a collaborative map as a key interface to mediate between player’s goals and green thumb’s community garden network. An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs trans-media storytelling to deliver a story that will be altered by player’s ideas or actions.

Concept

One in five New Yorkers experience a mental disorder in any given year (2020, NSDUH). From these, general anxiety disorder ranks highest at 25% of the surveyed population. Wanderland was a day-long scavenger hunt addressing the anxiety crisis in New York City by promoting urban slow practices anchored in community and nature. The concept drew from Alternative Reality Gamification (ARG) techniques to mediate between the on-the-ground scavenger hunt experience, and a virtual collaborative map, documenting the players experience and movements in real time.

QGIS Community Garden Mapping
I drew from the Department of Parks and Recreation’s green thumb garden datase (2023) to map out the garden locations onto a NYC basemap using QGIS. The goal was to give the map a gamified / illustrated feel that could become the backdrop for the collaborative map project on Felt. To achieve the illustrated feel, I georeferenced hand-drawn maps of the city, and used raster images to replace the default markers for each garden data point.

Felt Map Troubleshooting
I exported the QGIS layers into a virtual Felt map, to enable public collaboration and input. The illustrated map lost its definition with the zoom-in, zoom-out feature on Felt.

I settled for one of Felt’s background maps, to focus on legibility.

Co-Design Process
Aided by Green Thumb’s community managers, we sent out a survey to Green Thumb gardens to gauge interest in participating in a pilot scavenger hunt in December 2023. We narrowed it down to three community gardens in the Lower East Side (Carmen Pabon del Amanecer, Green Oasis, and Le Petit Versailles) who volunteered to pilot the concept on December 2nd, 2023. Peter Cramer from Le Petit Versailles, Carolyn Ratcliffe from Carmen Pabon, and Irene Meisel from Green Oasis attended three co-design sessions from November 12 to December 1st.

Meeting 1 Nov 12
The initial design meeting took place virtually on November 12, 2023. We introduced the gardeners to Miro board as a user-friendly collaborative design space.

We then presented the gardeners with a storyline proposal — centering around the life and activism of Carmen Pabon, a Puerto Rican activist and life-long resident of the Lower East Side (Loisada), whose crowning achievement was the inauguration of “Jardin Bello Amanecer” (currently Carmen Pabon del Amanecer Garden).

Drawing from archival research at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, each garden was given a theme that highlighted one aspect of her life and activism:

  1. Identity (reckoning with immigration, language barriers, and building a Puerto Rican stronghold in the lower east side).
  2. Loneliness (focusing on the isolation of community elders, and the ongoing struggle with drugs throughout the nineteen-sixties and seventies)
  3. Unidad (a unifying force in her community, Carmen strived to create spaces and vehicles to facilitate community life, and improve the quality of life in Loisada). An initial brainstorm took place to connect special garden features to Carmen’s poetic prompts, and inviting gardeners to think of what could be in the hidden treasure in the final garden location.

Meeting 2 The second meeting took place in person at Le Petit Versailles on November 19. We used blank sheets of paper and sticky notes to design specific prompts and activities that scavenger hunt participants would be expected to complete. These insights were then digitized and served as the input to create the scavenger hunt material and scheduling for the upcoming test.

Meeting 3
We met one final time at Carmen Del Pabon garden on December 1st, to give each gardener a series of folders and materials to turn their gardens into our scavenger hunt arena the next day. The inputs from the two previous meetings were translated into a “wanderer’s travel log,” designed to enable a self-guided experience where participants could complete each activity in an asynchronous manner. The travel log contained a psychogeographic basemap (QGIS, Indesign), a series of poetic prompts inspired by Carmen Pabon’s poetry, and clues to find the key to the next garden locations by scavenging around each garden.

HABEMUS SCAVENGER HUNT
Stop 1. Identity
Arrival and Receiving Travel Kit 11:30 AM (Carmen Pabon)
Participants arrived at the garden between 11:30 am and 12, where they were handed a travel kit, containing their travel log, a pencil, and an instruction sheet to set them off.

Image below: Participants arriving to first garden location They were asked to upload pictures to a shared drive in the picture station in each garden, using a QR code. They filled out reflective prompts in their wanderer’s travel log, and had to solve the riddle to find the key to the next garden location hidden somewhere in the garden.
Stop 2. Loneliness
12:30 AM Green Oasis
Participants had to learn to turn compost, a metaphor for “turning the compost on loneliness,” to see what’s on the other side.
They had to find a lonely worm hidden in the garden, that would unlock the key to the next garden location.
Upon arriving to Le Petit Versailles participants were asked to do a ring toss and make a wish, before finding their treasure hidden somewhere in the garden.