Selected skatepark and public-space work.

The front edge matters.

Lusaka had over a hundred active skateboarders and no legal place to skate. The Skate Association of Zambia had been working for years to change that, with a site secured at the NASDEC multi-sports complex in the centre of the capital and a vision for something that could actually grow with the community around it.

Vaughan came into the project on the concept and proposal side, working with the SAZ team to think through what the space could be, how to frame it for the people who needed to get behind it, and what it would take to move from a grassroots scene making do with wooden boxes and scrapped metal to a real park with real terrain.

The bowl belongs to the whole place.

The design thinking aimed at a destination-level space: a flow bowl, a street plaza, programming room, public amenities, and enough scale to hold events and give the scene somewhere to grow into.

The advocacy experience and the industry connections Vaughan brought in helped translate between what the local skaters knew they needed and the language that tends to move institutions.

The aerial still is still useful.

It shows the broader site logic, the spacing, and how the pieces talk to each other. That is why it still earns its place here.

The relationship continued beyond the initial proposal, because that is how these projects actually move.

The flythrough still matters.

Sometimes movement helps a project click faster than stills do. This cut keeps the larger site logic alive without turning the page into a video dump.

This one started with a conversation.

Dave Jonsson noticed an unused city-owned space at the end of a dead-end street near his home and saw something most people would have walked past. A leftover piece of ground that could make an argument to city hall about what small forgotten spaces are actually worth.

He asked Vaughan to build a model that could help people picture it.

The skate spot was part of the answer, not the whole pitch.

The concept was not about dropping skate features into a gap and calling it done. The site included a basketball court so the space could serve more than one group, a wall to manage sound for the nearby houses, and the existing trees stayed because the shade was worth keeping.

The skating was built into the design deliberately, not treated as the only reason the space existed.

A larger civic picture.

Knucklehds started as a skateboarding collective founded by Mosako Chalashika, a skater and photographer from Botswana who had built it into something wider: youth development, urban culture, community programming. The skatepark was the next logical step.

The concept drew on local cultural references: the kgotla, the diamond ring, the stage as civic gathering form. It was thinking about the skatepark as a multi-use civic space with real cultural layering, not just a concrete pad with an obstacle layout.

Outside-in support, local grounding.

Vaughan worked with the Knucklehds team on concept development, proposal thinking, and visual support. The collaboration brought in a western industry perspective and skate-space design thinking to work alongside what Mosako and his team were already building from inside the local culture.

The strongest design decisions came from that exchange. The usability thinking, the flow logic, and the way the space needed to hold both skate function and broader civic life all benefited from that outside-in support while the cultural grounding stayed local.

Sometimes the site-plan feeling matters most.

The aerial angle strips the concept back to circulation, relation, and massing, which is often where the truth of a project shows up.

Not every project arrives through the same door.

Belong is part concept, part visualization, part practical effort. That mix is real, and it says something honest about how these spaces come together.