This summer my boyfriend and I have planned a tour of the local skate parks. I'm doing this project, because I've always loved skateboarding, despite not really being able to skate with any confidence. Anyways, I've already put together the map below to outline our sites and begun identifying the key components we'd like to measure. My boyfriend has been skating since he was 8, so I'll be relying on his expert knowledge to provide further insight into components like the flow of a park. There's definately a few terms that need to be defined on our part, and a scan of the available literature. I'll be collecting all relevant aspects of the project below for my own enjoyment. And you the reader, if you're even there haha.
Okay so the methodology and final outcomes are beginning to appear clearly! I'm really inspired by the interviews that have been completed by Jenkem Magazine with regular park users, but it looks like we have gone into just taking mini skate videos of the parks we visit. After visiting the parks, I fill out a google form to get the majority of my observations down and then follow up by adding some approximate distances and area measurements completed through google maps. Of course, all of these measurements are very approximate and to be honest, quite crude, but I still believe it provides an opportunity to compare parks in interesting ways and brings up some interesting questions, like what is a feature in 3 dimentional space really? and what about all the unintended features (such as gaps, landscaping rocks, and pathway edges and curbs). There is so much to consider! And so much scope creep!
My boyfriend and I had a chance to visit about 5 of the skateparks. As I'm collecting data, Mitch spontaneously decided to film at one of the parks we visited where there were some locals (who were not children lol). So excited by this addition to the project!!
As we continue to visit a number of skateparks throughout the region, I can't help but reflect on some of the insights I've gained desipite not looking too deeply into the quantitive data associated with each park.
SPACE: this almost sounds stupid, but quite literally the space between FEATURES of the park is so important and contibutes to FLOW and further impacts the SKILL LEVEL associated with each FEATURE. something that i've noticed is that there are so many parks that are cramped up by just having too much s t u f f. I think a really beautiful component of the art of skateboarding is the ability to project creativity onto any surface. You don't need stuff to skate. Even just having a few "easy" features won't prevent a really skilled skater from hitting a feature, in fact it might produce a more creative output.