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The Truth in Fabrication, a One Hat One Hand Blog

From time to time we have something interesting to share so we finally got around to making a blog. This blog will contain opinions, ideas, insights, un-checked facts and undoubtedly a few typos. We hope you as equally forgiving of our flaws as you are generous for stopping to read this.

  • Writer's pictureMarketing Team

5 Insider Tips for World-Class Placemaking

We asked Nick Moser, our One Hat One Hand Accounts Director what his top 5 tips are for world-class Placemaking. From Future Proofing to Long-Term Sustainability Nick outlines things to plan for.

Tip #1: Future Proofing Tip #1 or Placemaking is to look beyond opening day so you know, we really want to think about how people are using these spaces 10 years out and how they have changed how the uses change, how the Aesthetics will change, how style has changed, how technology has changed so you know if we're looking at how beyond the opening day and what it's going to look like then we can look at you know infrastructure and we can look at what sort of physical Systems and Technology systems that can be updated in the future. Looking further into the future of the built environment allows for a kind of future-proofing of these spaces. Tip #2 Engage with Creative Communities The second Placemaking tip is to engage with the creative community early and often. We can avoid building things that aren't used by people and the way we want them to be used by talking to the people we want to use them. If we want a space to be used for play, talk to kids, talk to parents, talk to practitioners of workshops for playful activities. Tip #3 Long-term Sustainability The third Placemaking tip is to think about the operations and maintenance oftentimes, you know, if you build something, you must see how it changes and want it to change in a way that's aesthetically pleasing and still serves the purpose. It's going to look different in 10 years, and you want to use materials, techniques and technologies that will allow it to kind of age gracefully.

Tip #4 Mission-Critical Technology The 4th Placemaking tip is to use appropriate technology. I think that oftentimes people want to use the kind of the newest, hottest technology, which is great. We also want to be able to access it to change it out, we want to be able to update content, so there's really kind of a lot of like back-end stuff that we want to think about when we're using technology.

Tip #5 Revitalized Placemaking

Revitalized Placemaking is thinking about how we're going to make the space new and fresh as time passes so if things from engaging the space with more creative content, bringing pop-ups bringing muralists or changing out projector mapping so whatever it is to changing the content of the space we want to be able to do that seamlessly and inexpensively and quickly. If we think about that from the beginning, then we can still have the giant sculpture we can still have these large iconic Placemaking features that create the destination, but we can also allow them to evolve over time and have collaborations into the future.


One Hat One Hand is a design and fabrication company specializing in big public art, architectural placemaking, workplace design, product prototyping, experiential design and installation. You might be surprised to learn that we are a General Contractor Licensed in California and offer full-scale design-build and fit-out work. Our team of designers, fabricators, artists, welders & technologists work with artisans, architects, developers & builders to create large-scale placemaking features, art fabrication and specialty installations. One Hat One Hand delivers hyper-creative solutions for anyone looking to build something big, complicated, or never done before.


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