NeighborFood: Trilingual Signage

Worked with Two Bridges Neighborhood Council in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to co-develop commercial revitalization projects and connect local stakeholders to City resources.

I developed a multilingual wayfinding system for food businesses in New York City’s Chinatown, Lower East Side, and Two Bridges neighborhoods.

Goals:

Make stores accessible to all residents.
Increase local spending.
Foster and strengthen relationships between local business owners and residents.

Users: Business owners and residents in New York City's Chinatown, Lower East Side, and Two Bridges neighborhoods.

I used human-centered design, the design process and user experience design principles and techniques in the development.

I started with research, including interviewing key stakeholders to get a better understanding of the landscape. I spoke with key government officials, neighborhood organizations, small businesses owners and residents.

The research provided us with an understanding of the current landscape to solve for the users needs, and co-create the solution with the end user.

The neighborhood is multicultural and we needed to develop a solution that embraced and represented that.

Through our research, we developed a multilingual wayfinding system. This system is depicted in three languages and displayed outside and within food businesses in downtown Manhattan.

The signage features hierarchy and accessibility, including the incorporation of three languages and pictures.

The NeighborFood brand was developed previously by an outside agency and I built on top of it.

The signage is dry-erase. The largest sign is displayed outside food businesses and the store checks off the types of items sold within. Users can either read the sign or understand it visually. There’s also a QR code integrated within the sign that takes users to a digital map of each food business within the NeighborFood program.

We developed two additional signs for within the stores. One is advertising the program, while the other is dry erase as well and can be used for merchandise pricing.

In addition, we developed a social media campaign for users to learn more about the new trilingual signage and program.