This interactive map lets users learn about New York City's park events in a new, innovative way.  Choose a category (culture, tours, kids etc.), find events by date, search by keyword, and click through to event websites. Click on a park to see its schedule, or list the parks alphabetically to find their locations and events. The map is custom-designed to make it easy to explore the roughly 300 events and 50 parks across the city.

The map is built specifically for the NYC Parks Special Events dataset, on in-house software. It uses the same categories found on the NYC Parks website. New events are added daily.

INFORMATION FOR THE JUDGES

The map was custom-built on in-house software, and is specifically designed to display the dataset of NYC park events. By avoiding out-of-the-box solutions, such as Google Maps, the site not only has a unique, hand-crafted feel, but employs features that are tailored toward displaying park events and not available elsewhere.

Visual design:

The map focuses on the park locations and city boundaries. The event listings are concise enough to allow several to be seen at once. I used the same categories found on the city's park website, where the data originates, but have added my own icons to make the page more attractive and  tactile.

Functionality:

The application gives users several ways to find events. Users can list the parks alphabetically, find events within various timeframes, and search by keyword. Each event is clickable, and clicking brings up a venue's entire schedule. From here a user can click to a particular event's details on the city's website. Likewise, when exploring the map itself, a user can click on a park to bring up its full schedule, and click onward to the event details.

The map updates itself daily by not only grabbing the data provided in the RSS feed, but also by digging deeper to get additional vital information which is found only on each event's profile page.

Future uses:

This software can be adapted to display other NYC datasets. The New York Public LibraryEvents and Brooklyn Library events seem ideally suited for a similar map.