Making change possible: Urban prototyping and Transform

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The Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation kicked off its ninth annual Transform Conference on Thursday, September 14 at the Mayo Civic Center. But that wasn’t the only location in downtown Rochester where innovation was taking place during the four-day conference.

Coinciding with Transform 2016 was Rochester’s first-ever urban prototyping festival dubbed Placemakers | Rochester Prototyping Festival. Co-organized by Destination Medical Center, Rochester Downtown Alliance, and the Rochester Art Center, the festival featured the creations of 16 teams representing a diverse range of backgrounds.

0T3A0273From farmers to architects, pharmacists to poets, each team developed an urban prototype to address the festival’s theme of “Health and the Built Environment.”

Transform 2016 and Placemakers shared similar goals to improve health and wellness through building design. This vision was prominent in both the work of Transform speaker Whitney Austin Gray, Ph.D. of Delos and was echoed in the aspirations of many PlaceMakers prototypes, including Destination Inner Peace, which integrated elements of natural and built environments to improve pedestrians’ mental health.

The festival’s inherent innovation, coupled with its focus on 0T3A0472health, made it’s timing a great complement to the Transform 2016 line-up, which explored the evolution and transformation of health care.

Read more about Transform and Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation here.