Engineering students partner with local artist on community initiative

A team of engineering students are collaborating with a local artist to improve the walkability of the neighborhood surrounding campus. The students are members of Engineering Service Design Team (ESDT), a student led organization that uses their engineering skills for projects that benefit the community.

Mac Love, the artist spearheading this project, has a passion for connecting people to neighborhoods. He had the idea to use Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to log data on local intersections in University Park, the neighborhood that surrounds The University of Akron campus. The students worked with him previously when they designed a mobile splash park a few years back.

“We were really interested in making an impact in our community around the University of Akron," says Scott Salerno, the team lead. "By combining Mac’s existing knowledge of the area and our engineering backgrounds, we were able to come up with a systematic and objective way to analyze intersections.”

The GIS Walkability Survey Project started in the fall and data collection is expected to wrap up this month. Data is collected twice for each intersection – in the afternoon and at night. Students are recording road conditions, sidewalk conditions, litter, how well lit the area is, among other data, in real time through the Survey 123 app. By the time the project is complete, students will have logged data on over 150 intersections.

Additional members of the team include Amanda O’Reilly, Benjamin Roter, Carissa Thompson, and Clark Bates. The group will be synthesizing their data and presenting a report of their outcomes to the City of Akron in the coming months.

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