People:Introducing Our Stellar New Intern. Willkommen Brenda, ‘So Glad You’re Here.

‘Good follows good.’
-Bernard, owner of Bernard’s Wear and Stepper Store www.bernardswear.com

Quite frankly we’re not really sure who is following whom but we couldn’t be more excited to have Brenda Gamboa join our team. A multi-year grand prize winner of Chicago’s Newhouse Architecture Competition (here) for high school students, Brenda is also an incredibly accomplished photographer and one of the nicest, hardest working people we know. Given her particular gift for gab and excellent photography skills, Brenda has been helping us prototype and launch a brand new project that we’ve designed for Landon Bone Baker, We Live Here.

Much like the Citizen Designer Workshop that we created for the Hester Street Collaborative, Public Workshop has been working hard to build a unique infrastructure for Landon Bone Baker in which young designers can easily plug into the firm’s work and add incredible value, and capacity to what it’s already doing. Much of this work involves entirely reframing our standard notions of what’s possible for high school students and young adults to contribute to a design process, professional environment or community. In this scenario, Public Workshop will often create scenarios where young adults are given significant leadership and creative responsibilities that are typically only afforded to seasoned designers twice their age.

With this in mind Brenda is currently designing the interview methodology, documentation and sharing process for We Live Here. With this work and intensive mentoring over the next month, Brenda will be one of our key leaders and community interface partners for ******* (top secret, you understand), another unique added-value project that Public Workshop is developing for Landon Bone Baker.

Make sure you mosey on by Brenda’s Flickr stream (Can you believe she’s only 19??!!) to see some of her outstanding photographs (here)

And keep an eye on We Live Here to see some of her latest work for Public Workshop and Landon Bone Baker Architects (here).