What do you do when you don’t have the staff to measure the impact of or maintain green infrastructure projects that your department has installed and distributed in a decentralized fashion throughout a city? ‘How about growing a corps of citizen scientists? Given our work helping create Shadelab, it’s probably not surprising that we think […]
From October 1st through 15th, Public Workshop will be design-building a fantastic play landscape in the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s PHS Pop-Up Garden at 20th and Walnut. Working with a core group of Philadelphia teenagers and young designers, Public Workshop will engage families, schools, and children in creating this one-of-a-kind adventure playground. Initially taking the form […]
As you may know, for at least the past three years, I have been using big-urban-games (B.U.G.-coined by Katie Salen and others) and play as mechanisms for accomplishing great things when it comes to participatory design and learning. On one hand I have hacked games such as hide-n-go-seek, capture the flag, and parcours to implicitly instill the […]
Hey folks. It’s been an incredibly productive year for Public Workshop and our website no longer is able to even remotely represent the volume, breadth, or depth of our work. We are in the midst of redesigning our site but until we are done, our Facebook page is going to be our primary medium for […]
A few weeks ago we led a youth and community engagement event for our clients, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and the City of Austin, Texas. For the event, we deployed our patented chocolate cake master planning process to best engage the community’s youth and their families, and put their local insights and ideas at the forefront […]
Ponder these equations. t+ap=ge (teens + instigating really awesome design-build placemaking improvements in their neighborhood=greater community engagement + civic innovation) tw+ap=aie (teenage women + instigating really awesome design-build placemaking improvements in their own neighborhood=absolutely incomparable community engagement + civic innovation) Ya know, one would think that given our pioneering of the first formula that I […]
Can design thinking programs lead students to perform better in their core academic subjects? Whether you decide to replace design thinking with ‘arts education’ or not, an affirmative answer of ‘yes’ to this question is the holy grail of funders, program directors, and measurement fanatics everywhere. From over 14 years of doing this type of […]
What role can teens in Flint, MI play in stimulating civic and social innovation in their city? We are excited to bring #TinyWPA to Flint in late October as part of the ArtPlace funded Flint Public Art Project and be a part of the Congress For Urban Transformation (C.U.T.) with friends Damon Rich, James Rojas, and […]
September 27, 2012
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