Park Bench Story...
How it started
Here is one of my favorite views from a bench in Baurs Park, Hamburg overlooking the Elbe River.
The request for finding park benches came out of a request from my daughter
My daughter came home one day with a friend. It was a warm, sunny day and they wanted to be outside in the city. They had been walking around for ages with a cold drinks in hand looking for a place to sit and have a chat. “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an app to find park benches near me?” they asked retorically.
So I thought, why not build one?
I have spent my career in tech — hardware, software, cloud and more recently with data and AI. I actually studied engineering because I could not get my portfolio of hand-drawn sketches together for admissions into architecture programs. Now, with all the new tools that are available, I thought I will just see what I can build that can bring together communities online and offline.
Click to view the app
Local community accessible to all
I have always been interested in the dialogue of public/private spaces. And, lately I have been thinking about how that also applies to digital space and urban planning. This will be a space where I explore topics related to the built environment and society; how people use public spaces and how those spaces become part of their individual and collective memories.
I will be posting every two weeks. I am open to guest essays if anyone would like to contribute their perspective or expertise. This is a creative space for me and I will keep it free. All I ask is if you find something interesting or you want to reference it, please just link/credit it back to me.
A word about the tech
I used Claude to help me understand what types of maps I may be able to access as well as see if there were soltuions already availabe. Though I found two others using the same Open Street Maps (OSM) data, they did not deliver the same type of experience I wanted to offer around community building. Then I asked Claude the pros and cons of different app and web building tools. I decided to go with Loveable even though it was not on the top of the list. My decision was mainly based on the the other recommendations being more for developers, though easy to use. I did not want to get lost in the weeds of coding and API calls. I wanted something that could evolve with me and still allow me to question certain aspects of the build. And I wanted to be EU based. Interestingly enough, Loveable is built using Claude Code, it is based in the EU (GDPR requirements built-in), it is hosted on AWS (full-disclosure, a former employer) and one of the investor is out of Hamburg.