Alex Gilliam | alex@publicworkshop.us | 172 posts
Urban Geek Drinks, is a monthly happy hour for a diverse group of civic do-gooders in Philadelphia. It’s an opportunity for you to connect with other people who give a damn and are working incredibly hard to make Philadelphia a really great city. Organized by Aaron Ogle of Open Plans and Alex Gilliam of Public Workshop, it grows [...]
May 22, 2013
We couldn’t be more pleased to announce that over the past couple of months, The Department of Making + Doing (DM+D) has won a series of significant grants from ArtPlace, Knight Arts Challenge, and Cognizant, as part of its Making the Future STEM education program. DM+D is the ‘making’ oriented civic innovation workshop/makerspace that we have opened with our [...]
May 16, 2013
The Building Hero Project is Public Workshop’s young adult community design leadership program through which we are growing an army of empowered and skilled young adult leaders and change agents who are able to help make their neighborhoods and Philadelphia better places to live through design. Every year a diverse team of 16-25 year olds [...]
May 16, 2013
Amazing things happen to a community when its most resilient members–youth–are empowered to visibly take the lead in designing, building, and problem solving for its future. This Spring, the fine folks at Compostmodern did a great job of documenting the talk I gave about TinyWPA and the incredibly moving community design-build project that we did [...]
April 29, 2013
Every week, one of the members of The Building Hero Project, our community design leadership program in Philadelphia, will be reflecting upon and sharing their experiences in the program. This week, Alexa E., a 16 year old building hero from the Science Leadership Academy writes about the bench building workshop she helped lead for Leadership [...]
March 21, 2013
‘It would be great if we had this (youth-built adventure playgrounds) all over Philly’. ~Jon (and many others) who helped design, build, and play on our TinyWPA adventure playground. We couldn’t be more excited to announce that a proposal by Public Workshop and our fantastic partner, Smith Playground (the second oldest playground in the country, to [...]
January 25, 2013
Well, we can honestly say that we never imagined that we would end up either on a top 100 list OR a top 100 list with Bill Clinton and Brad Pitt. Nonetheless, we are truly honored to be listed with an incredible host of people and organizations who are doing incredible things to make the [...]
December 22, 2012
Say ‘Hello’ to THE DEPARTMENT OF MAKING + DOING. Public Workshop, Breadboard, and The Hacktory with the incredible support of NextFab Studio are combining forces to launch a civic innovation workshop and STEAM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Arts-Mathematics) laboratory in Philadelphia. To be housed in NextFab’s original facilities at the University City Science Center in West Philadelphia, this unique [...]
December 12, 2012
Our Work With Demoiselle 2 Femme And Eleven Incredible Teenage Ladies Wins The Metropolitan Planning Council’s Placemaking Award (Grand Prize!). ‘I can’t believe that Roseland used to be known as the ‘Community of Hope’ but is now known as the ‘Community of No Hope’……….and our eleven young ladies are changing this attitude.’ In any community [...]
November 30, 2012
‘Wow, I can it see all the way from Lehigh Avenue. The green and the trees…..it just makes me so happy. It lifts my spirits.’ ‘I have some land next to my house, will you build some trees there for us?’ ‘That’s nice, real nice.’ We are happy to report that our Tiny WPA team [...]
November 30, 2012
Two weeks. One great organizational partner. Seventy teens and young designers from five universities and seven high schools. Hundreds of kids and their families. A few power tools and $2000 worth of materials. One awesome pop-up adventure playground at the very center of Downtown Philadelphia that begins to redefine our conceptions of risk, play, and [...]
November 30, 2012
Fifteen hours, two awesome collaborators, three bus stop seating prototypes, and eleven teens who now really want to design-build more things that improve their city. In late October, we decamped from Philadelphia for a week in Flint, MI to work with Job Corps and the Flint Public Art Project to do one of our Tiny WPA [...]
November 28, 2012
We are honored that Philadelphia Magazine has chosen Tiny WPA (Works Progress Administration) as one of the brightest ideas in Philadelphia and designated our Director, Alex Gilliam, one of the most innovative minds in the city. Tiny WPA is a program initiated by Public Workshop that places young adults at the forefront of stimulating community [...]
October 11, 2012
One would think that this question, coming just two weeks into launching our beta version of TinyWPA, would send me over the moon. Shoot, after just two weeks, a motley crop of uninitiated #teendesignheroes in Philly ‘got it’ and wanted more. And they didn’t just want MORE, they were looking to initiate their own projects with their [...]
October 10, 2012
Friends, you have two great opportunities to help create and then enjoy something truly incredible (that doesn’t exist anywhere else) in the very heart of downtown Philadelphia. Over the past week, Public Workshop has worked with over seventy teenagers and young designers to design-build the beginnings of a fantastic play landscape in the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s PHS Pop-Up Garden between 19th [...]
September 27, 2012
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 [...]
September 26, 2012
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 [...]
September 11, 2012
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 [...]
September 9, 2012
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 [...]
September 9, 2012
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 [...]
May 30, 2013
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