Korok Estates

Summary: A Dérive is a French concept meaning an aimless walk through city streets, that follows the whim of the moment. This project used this concept to understand the parks of London from the perspective of a squirrel. So we used aimless walks to find a pattern of movement of squirrels around local parks, and used these concepts to map the trees around London.

Our Process: Through these natural works, we understand the nature of the squirrels in the area and their relationship with the trees. We created our own dataset, mapping which trees squirrels tended to use for safety, foraging for food, or just for living.

Putting our thoughts together, we created a high-level map of the local parks using icons to indicate what kind of tree each was via our categorization. We then made a series of spider charts to illustrate the traits of the trees according to our dataset.

Deliverables:

When doing this, we then came to an understanding that some parks had better trees for eating vs having a home, etc. Based on this, we decided to dig more into the theme and create a squirrel real estate company by the name of Korok Estates. Based on the dataset curated by the Office of National Statistics, we started pricing areas based on what we saw the value of the trees in each of the boroughs. Our deliverables by the end of the project were a deck, which can be seen here, and an accompanying pamphlet below.

Our next phase is to create a 3d web interactive, which is currently in progress but can be seen here.