SPENCER KID’S STATION will create a transport-themed play space at the North Carolina Transportation Museum, Spencer, NC – once Southern Railway’s largest steam locomotive repair facility. Children of all ages and abilities and accompanying, playful adults, will experience locomotive and other forms of travel through active, healthy, imaginative play, riding around the Loop, floating boats down the Grand Canal, creating who-knows-what in the Maker Space, relaxing on the Porch, playing in Tots Town, and much more. All this has yet to be as the Transportation Museum navigates the many challenges of budget, operations, management—& pandemic disruption. The role of NLI in working with agencies with commonplace constraints, while juggling competing potential projects, is to bring stakeholders together in consensus-building workshops to establish the project mission, goals, objectives, and programmatic design elements.

Front-end inputs may include surveys of current and prospective users, community interest groups, and their participation in the design process. Observations of human use and technical studies of the site may also be conducted, along with documentation of “precedent projects” in use elsewhere. All help guide the form and content of the master plan and schematic design, accompanied by public presentations and the creation of compelling resources (drawings, models, posters, web pages, etc.) to inspire eventual project implementation.