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
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 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 [...]
August 14, 2012
Here’s a question for you, ‘What is the all-time most popular post on the Public Workshop website?’ No, it’s not chocolate cake master planning, learning from snowstorms, or one of a number of critiques on the profession of architecture. By a margin of well over 14,000 hits, the most popular post on the Public Workshop [...]
Have you checked out the stats for the number of women who are architects or in STEM related professions in this country? How about women of color? 20% of registered architects in the United States are women. Approximately 25% of STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) positions in the U.S. are held by women. And [...]
April 3, 2012
Do you scream for Waller Creek? We sure do. We couldn’t be more excited to be a community engagement consultant for a stellar team led by Melk! Landscape Architecture and Page Southerland Page that has been chosen as semi-finalists to design the master plan for Austin, Texas’ Waller Creek. Quite frankly the team is comprised [...]
Our new 12″ Build-It! Mini-Discs are so new that they are not even up on our beabuildinghero website. Why in the world have we decided to fabricate 12″ Discs when the 15″ are pretty darn great? First and foremost, the 12″ Discs fall into a shipping sweet spot and the resulting shipping costs are significantly less [...]
December 20, 2011
”The burgeoning trend in design-thinking education is embracing the F-word. One organization that embodies this empowering education model is Public Workshop.“~ Fast Company What better way to cap a long day of meetings to find a few of our Chicago #teendesignheroes–Jeisson, Audrey, Jovanna, Edwin, Joseph and Diana–standing proudly at the top of the Fast Company [...]
Montreal’s Vendome neighborhood has a brand new, massive hospital in its very near future that will have a huge impact on the fabric of the neighborhood and yet most people don’t even know it’s coming. What happens when you gather commuters, passersby, local kids, politicians, news media, college students and cheerleaders (!) to build a [...]
September has been a busy month for Public Workshop. It kicked off with Alex Gilliam presenting on the importance of prototyping behaviors for civic innovation at the Social Capitol Markets Conference on a panel about prototyping with Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO.org, Adam Dole of the Mayo Clinic and Veronika Scott of the Empowerment Plan. Thanks to Sarah [...]
August 16, 2011
Over the weekend we learned that Public Workshop has been invited by Architecture For Humanity to submit new design ideas for a forlorn skatepark under the Manhattan Bridge in New York City. Yes, we’re honored to be in the company of much of New York’s design elite including Balmori Associates, Bernheimer Architecture and others but [...]
August 16, 2011
We are simply ecstatic to have won a grant, in collaboration with AIA Austin, from the Downtown Austin Alliance to create a series of events, participatory design tools and a crowdsourced ideas competition to engage citizens of Austin, Texas in re-imagining vacant and underused spaces on Congress Ave–directly across from the State Capitol! Working with [...]
Young adults dressed in lab coats using over-sized thermometers to find heat islands in their neighborhoods? A two-foot nose, sculpted to make the process of measuring air quality more visible to community members? These are but two of many projects undertaken last year by Shadelab, a unique, community design leadership program in which talented young Chicago adults gather [...]
May 22, 2013
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