A community-driven design initiative enhancing tourism in Jamaica Plain through a strategic signage system.

Jamaica Plain is a diverse, beautiful neighborhood rich with culture, cuisine, and natural green spaces. While the neighborhood is known and beloved by many in Boston, it does not experience the visiting numbers of more popular destinations in the city like Newbury Street, Fenway, or the North End.

After a rich set of interviews with local business owners, we formulated a design solution using the well-known JCDecaux totems seen around more touristy areas of the city, featuring a specially designed proximity map of Jamaica Plain, combined with in-store magnet boards meant to draw attention and guide tourists to nearby "favorites."

Through field interviews with local business owners, we put our ear to the ground to engage with and understand how the community sees their town and how they believe it could experience growth. By talking to these businesses, we realized that it wasn't a lack of great stores or friendly people that kept tourists away, nor a lack of public transportation or easy access to the area. What we found was that people did not know about the wonderful areas like Centre St and Hyde Square, and the businesses they have to offer.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Our first finding after interviewing local business owners was that there are destinations that already draw lots of people throughout the year. We dubbed these the big attractors of the area and sought to understand how we could capitalize on them to retain and redirect people who are already traveling to the area to explore a bit further than what they already came to see.

JCDecaux is an advertising agency that the City of Boston already uses to pay for many public amenities, such as bus stops and signs in exchange for advertising space. We could strategically capture the attention of big attraction visitors to inform and direct them towards shopping areas nearby to their location without costing the city a dime.

Through previous research and our conversations with the business owners, we knew that Centre Street and Hyde Square were the hot spots in the city due to a high density of retailers, restaurants, and community organizations. However, while these areas see high activity, they aren't nearly as popular or known as Back Bay, Harvard Square, or Coolidge Corner.

Revealed in our research, the big attractors of Jamaica Plain are the biggest contributors to tourist traffic throughout the year, featuring big names and destinations.

Through previous research and our conversations with the business owners, we knew that Centre Street and Hyde Square were the areas with the most traffic in the city due to retailers and restaurants.

All together, the strategic placing of the sign totems would capture the attention of the most amount of visitors and draw them to commercial areas of the city that they might not have known about before visiting the big attractor they initially came for.

Using the research we did on compiling the most beloved local businesses in the area, we created a series of proximity maps (based on the starting point of the Arnold Arboretum) to showcase what someone would see when they approached a totem.

Another critical finding we had was that after talking with the first business, we were quickly led to talk to more businesses that we were unaware of during our initial research. There was an obvious snowballing effect between businesses that showed that not only was there a myriad of businesses in JP, but they were keen on supporting and directing customers to each other like a symbiotic network.

Once visitors are drawn into target areas, local businesses will have in-store signage in the form of magnet boards that offer recommendations at the store owner's discretion. These magnet boards serve as a way to facilitate the "What else is nearby?" conversation or search that a visitor might wonder about while also giving the business owner a chance to promote places they desire.

Scannable QR codes on the totems and magnet boards offer app integration with Quest Boston, an ai-driven tourism app designed to give personalized recommendations based on user behavior and preferences. QR scans also offer free, trackable data to the app by telling them which totems or store magnets are getting the most scans.

Alongside an app called MacWhisper, my project partner and I utilized AI to help us transcribe and interpret our interview transcripts faster and more effectively. While we remembered the key pieces of information from our conversations, it was important to know we were not leaving anything out; ChatGPT helped us stay on target.