Kelsey Wakefield is an interactive landscape architect and urban designer focused on energy systems and our relationship to them.
With investigative curiosity, and a fun-centric approach to complex issues, Wakefield looks into how city systems can be catalysts of social change. As a graduate from Rhode Island School of Design’s Master of Landscape Architecture program, Wakefield emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to her work focusing on digital media platforms in public space.
Inspired by her time as an AmeriCorps VISTA with NHS of New Haven, building community consensus around housing and energy security, she values hands on research practice. While at RISD, Wakefield received a grant to study indigenous city building technologies of the Aztecs, Incas and Uru to better understand how to implement low energy urban design solutions.
Raised in a petroleum-centric town in Alaska, Wakefield is no stranger to being caught between resistance to energy market changes and the call for sustainable action. She now calls the Bay Area her home but wishes to be a part of energy policy conversation on national and international scales. Wakefield is currently looking to collaborate with scientists, engineers and other designers to create meaningful intelligent public infrastructures for people who use them.
https://www.kelseywakefield.com/
Project: GRID-talk
Kelsey Wakefield is an interactive landscape architect and urban designer who graduated from Rhode Island School of Design.
Raised in a petroleum-centric town in Alaska, Wakefield is no stranger to being caught between resistance to energy market changes and the call for sustainable action. Her project investigates the sources of the energy we use in our cities and homes and aims to engage the public with generation methods through interactive public spaces.
Grid Talk 2017
“An inquiry on how, why, and where our energy is made and how it is conveyed. How do understand better, this ubiquitous life giving system which is so prevalent in our public realm? Can we build appreciation for these systems which sustain us? Is there a way designers can be advocates for policies around energy?
Join me in my graduate thesis project which takes us through electric origins, the New England power system, New York State independent system and it’s ties to New York City where we encounter an old system which boggles and awes: The New York Steam System. At the end of an energetic journey we land on a simple intervention which sheds light on an underground powerhouse and it’s need to be heard.
It’s time to be an advocate for dynamic energy systems and the humans who use them. ”