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 of a remarkable group of people who bring unique capacities to the table that aren’t typically part of a public space design team. We can’t really say much more than that right now but I can’t imagine a more qualified and exemplary team to transform one of the most hidden but significant spaces in Austin into a world class public space. Needless to say, we are also truly excited to be a part of the team because of our considerable love-affair with the space. You may recall that way back in 2009, along with a couple of good friends, we launched the Waller Creek Is For Lovers Action And Adventure Society (WCIFL) in an effort to explore different means for meaningfully engaging people in the design of public spaces such as Waller Creek where typical planning and design methods were not working. Needless to say we had a heck of a lot of fun, developed some pretty cool participatory design tools such as our chocolate cake master planning process, helped raise awareness about the Creek, and fell in love with the space.

Are you in Austin for Easter Sunday? Great.

Come to ‘Ice Cream For Waller Creek!, the Melk! Landscape Architecture & Page Southerland Page Kick-Off Party from 3-5 pm at the Mohawk. Bring your ideas, questions, kids and an empty stomach (for ice cream of course). Help us start to imagine a new future for Waller Creek and help support the coolest, most fantastically great team out there in our bid to design the future of this essential Austin space.

How can you help?

Come to Sunday’s design party: Ice Cream For Waller Creek!

‘Like’ our team on Facebook! Melk! Team Landscape Architecture & Page Southerland Page

The larger need in Philadelphia is obvious for something like Tiny WPA that is empowering, inspiring, has demonstrable impact, creates a system for larger change, and is frankly, awesome. Why start with bus stops?

On an immediate level, the Village—like many other arts organizations in the city—is the only provider of free after-school art programs to the 1500 teens who live in a 260-block service area. Due to this and the distribution of public schools, most youth ride buses to access services. In the spirit of the Safe Routes To School program, new bus stops strengthen partnering youth organizations and schools by creating recognizable place-making ‘markers’ for youth in a sea of nondescript bus stops. Simultaneously, bus stops provide an easy point of entry for consistently engaging a larger community and a highly visible stage for young adults to redefine possibility and grow a movement.

If the government doesn’t have the chutzpah to launch a WPA of CCC for the 21st century, we will. One of the most exciting aspects of Tiny WPA is its scalability. Tiny WPA provides a simple mechanism for training teens and young designers to work together to initiate change through design in their cities–this is an important missing element in the current love affair with kids, design thinking, and design for social good. We must take the time to grow the people and systems to fully realize the potential of the aforementioned ideas. Tiny WPA also has the potential as a deployable framework/collection of methods, recognizable branding and umbrella under which our collaborators, clients and friends in other cities can initiate similar change in their cities.

Would you like to be a Building Hero! like Paul and RJ?
Would you like to get involved or help support Tiny WPA?
Would you like us to bring Tiny WPA to your neighborhood, school, community or after-school organization?
You want to buy an ‘I Am A Building Hero’ t-shirt to help support Tiny WPA awesomeness?

Send us an email! info@publicworkshop.us

Tiny WPA was a finalist in StakePhilly‘s fantastic micro-grant program–thanks guys for a great event.

FYI- the Tiny WPA (www.tinywpa.org) website/landing page will go live in a few days.

Many of you might suggest more comfortable chairs, more time between classes or even lockers. These are all things that directly impact your life. Some of your ideas are pretty cool but you can see or feel them, they are immediately tangible. But would you have given up a better desk to come up with something that would have made your TEACHER’s job easier? Unprompted, in the 7th grade, would YOU have connected the dots between a pattern of use, classroom management, the location of an object and your own academic success?

I am lucky that I get to see, hear and do amazing things with young adults all the time but walking into MS 118 in the Bronx yesterday, I was stunned. A day later I am still smiling.

As you may know, Public Workshop has been working with DreamYard, openhousenewyork and MS 118 (a public middleP school in the Bronx) to develop a community design leadership program (supported by the National Endowment for the Arts) called, i am a design leader.

‘i am a design leader empowers students to find opportunities and create innovative solutions for improving their learning, one classroom at a time.’

The program is an ambitious prototype and that means there are some bumps and bobbles but there are also some moments of stunning ‘holy wow’. Seeing a bully in one of the classrooms transform into the class’s design leader and the sharpest lateral thinker in the group has been one of these special moments. Truly collaborative lesson planning, in which the English teacher is not only holding the designer to a higher aesthetic bar but, on her own volition, continually reinforcing her students’ writing process with the design process and vice versa, has also been fantastic. These are just a few of the great things that have been happening.

If you’ve worked with 7th graders, you will know that the 7th grade is a tough year for teachers and students alike. New social conditions, different academic performance expectations and a whole bunch of brand new hormones bouncing around mean that students tend to be simultaneously brash as they jockey for social positions and very vulnerable to criticism. As such we’ve spent a lot of time ‘opening them up’, putting them in the position where they feel like they can truly critique the world around them–able to really talk about the things that are wrong, broken or that they would like to make better. The results? Fantastic. They are pointing out and finding solutions to all sorts of issues around the school and in their classrooms that they were not ready to do at the beginning of the program. Their openness and sense of empowerment–t hey regularly write in their reflections about how they now see themselves as agents of change–are two of the greatest successes of the program thus far. However, while we have done a lot with learning how to look at and critique things, we haven’t even touched on analyzing user behavior–yet.

So, imagine my surprise when I walked into MS 118 yesterday to find Akash’s It Would Be Great If…. statement as pictured above. If given the opportunity to change ANYTHING at MS 118, to make his learning better, he didn’t propose different uniforms, more comfortable chairs or lockers for every student. Instead of glitzy and glamorous things–tangible things–Akash simply wants the school telephone in the classroom moved from the wall to the teacher’s desk. That’s it. He made the connection that with regular calls from the school’s office, the existing placement of the phone diminishes his (excellent) teacher’s ability to teach and thereby help him achieve his very best.

I do get to see stuff like this a lot but, wow, I never tire of it, not even for a moment.

Thank you Akash.

To be clear, there are many other amazing ones too. Mirilam’s suggestion for widening the windows on the classroom doors to actually ‘prevent’ classroom interruptions is super perceptive. Rayshaun’s desire to create a garden and ‘greened’ tutoring area on the roof that puts students in a different mindset when working on tough topics is incredibly sensitive. There are just a few. We are just at the beginning and I can’t wait to see both how much deeper they are able to go, and what they ultimately end up improving.

–Alex Gilliam

One evening about a year ago, staff members at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, did something a bit unusual as they prepared to close the Lego building area for the evening. Charmed by its simple beauty, they spared a rather handsome yellow pyramid created by one of the museum’s visitors from their ruthlessly thorough daily Lego disassembly process. Instead of completely “wiping the slate clean” for the next day’s visitors, on this evening they broke with tradition and positioned the pyramid in a prominent place in the building area.

Not long after the museum’s opening the next morning, I shuffled into the Lego room. It was filled with the typical assortment of visitors, happily building . . . pyramids, in every imaginable shape, size, and color. In fact, the room was beginning to positively overflow with them.

Walk into the Lego “free-play” building area at the Building Museum on any given day, and you will see a room filled with people of all ages and backgrounds, eagerly building away. Many of these people—architecture students, ten-year-olds, grandfathers with their grandchildren, tourists—spend entire Saturdays in this room, building things. With thousands upon thousands of Legos, consistently diverse groups of people, and scores of posters challenging you to build the various pieces of architecture that comprise our cities, it seems improbable that the room would be anything but a sea of creativity. And yet on most days, instead of a sweeping diversity of creations, one building pattern or formal expression completely dominates. Sometimes the room is jam-packed with towers; on other occasions by houses, animals, or people’s names spelled with Legos.

Despite this regular conformity, it is always possible to find a few individuals—of no consistent age or background—doing something completely different from everyone else. Their creative motivations became one of the focal points of my research during my Field Fellowship last year at the Building Museum. In many ways, their “outlier” creations appear to be the epitome of how we typically conceive of creativity, often completely challenging the basic rules dictated by the general form of the Lego. However, curiously, while they couldn’t always point out their inspiration, every single “outlier” claimed that they were simply expanding on some combination of Lego pieces that they had seen elsewhere in the room. Even the most “creative” people in the room began, like their tower-building brethren, by copying something or mimicking someone in their general visual proximity. Equally interesting was the lack of response to the museum’s design cues, intended to inspire architectural greatness and the creation of certain building types. These cues include numerous text- and image-based prompts, as well as a significant nearby exhibit of exemplary architecture, such as the Burj Khalifa, made out of Legos.

Struck by these observations, I began to wonder whether it would be possible to influence the Lego room’s collective building pattern in an intentional fashion and get everyone building completely against the room’s regular patterns and the “rules” embedded in the form of the Lego. One evening I lingered well after the museum closed and built three of my own “outlier” creations, strategically placing them in visible locations around the room for the next morning’s horde of builders. With their layered planes, shifting abstract forms, and blocks tipped on their sides, these were “outlier” creations in every way and were unlike anything one might find in the Building Museum on a given day.

Despite the rather alien nature of these objects, the next morning I found a five-year-old girl wrapping up her own amazing “outlier” creation. Expanding on my shifting planes and rotated blocks, she had created a form that I couldn’t have imagined, a true thing of beauty that, to this day, I am not sure how she managed to construct.

As soon as she placed her completed object on the central building table, it was immediately surrounded by a gaggle of ten-year-old boys. Forming a tight, admiring circle, they excitedly discussed and examined her structure before going their separate ways to build their own “outliers.” Driven not just by a desire to build something cool but by sentiments like, “Well, if a kid can build something that cool, surely I can do better,” adults soon joined in the building fray, working intently to attempt to outdo the children around them. Both the girl’s and my original efforts having shown new possibilities, the room quickly became a sea of new creations.

Of the many different new tools for participating as a citizen in our communities, I currently find the ones that are focused on “doing” and “showing” the most consistently compelling. Similar to Legos, temporary or tactical urbanism—as practiced by the Guerrilla Benchers, UX (the French city-hacker group), performative flash mobs, and many others—is easy to fall in love with. It taps into some of our most basic human desires, especially the urge to make something—whether an object or a tangible experience—that allows us to even momentarily take control of or tangibly impact the world around us. As a means for stimulating civic innovation and larger engagement, the experiences in the Lego room offer helpful “diagrams” of basic human behavior. They are reminders of how much more influential the simple physical actions and creations of those immediately around us can be than just about any other “input,” whether word or image or something else.

These are not groundbreaking concepts. The research of Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch introduced these ideas a long time ago. Current work around such things as connecting obesity to the peer pressure of group eating habits continues this thread. However, the wonderful “outlier” creations by the little girl and others show a much more nuanced view of these understandings, providing opportunities to fundamentally question our notions of expertise, collaboration, creation, and our own agency as citizens or designers.

On the one hand, they remind us that if we are thoughtful about when, where, and how we take action as members of a community, we can positively influence a system or the world around us, even building a movement. In line with Jonah Lehrer and others’ recent critique of “groupthink” and collaboration, my experiments in the Lego room demonstrate the incredible importance of having the right people at the right table at the right time.

On the other hand, it is both exciting and humbling to know that if we put a five-year-old girl next to a seasoned designer, whether we ask them to collaborate or not, they are most likely going to influence each other’s work. The seasoned designer or “expert,” better able to recognize patterns, is going to be able to more quickly expand on them. The five-year-old girl, unencumbered by those patterns, will head off in an entirely different direction. Proximity allows both of them to “scaffold” off one another, reaching a point of creation that neither could have reached alone. Ultimately, who is the expert here? I say this with a wink, because the lessons gained from Legos and a five-year-old girl are not directly transferable to every challenge, discipline, or situation.

Prototyping and “showing” new behaviors, expertise, and relationships is essential to best meeting the substantial needs of society today. As we all know, many systems and organizations for solving our cities’ most pressing problems are broken, and by extension our understanding of how to solve them and who participates is also often broken. As such, we need more places and generative opportunities, like Lego rooms, to fundamentally rethink how people might engage with one another to make our cities great.

Your picture–along with every other participant–is taken with the tag on because, well, YOU are Benson Park. The Park, like many public spaces has a large group of users but the stakeholders that typically show up for the meetings only represents a small portion of this users. From what you’ve heard, the hows that the meeting attending stakeholders desires for the Park don’t entirely align with those of the larger group of users. To ensure the long-term health of the Park and create the most appropriate designs for the LARGER group of users, it is important to celebrate these other users and even expand the stakeholder group.

Halfway through the event, you and every other participant are asked to take a seat around a big table, flip over your name tag and have a look at the back. Whoa! Much to your surprise you find what looks like an overhead view of the Park etched into the back of your name tag. You smile and notice that across the table, your neighbor Leanne is smiling too. Spread out around you are pieces of wood, glue, paint, a bunch of other miscellaneous materials and what look like miniature felt lollipops. When asked to use the materials before you to build Benson Park on the back of your name tag, you quickly realize that, wait, those lollipops are actually trees. Starting to play with the supplies in the other bowls it becomes clear that the small wooden blocks are buildings and the miniature circles represent the fountain that everyone loves so much has yet to be repaired from when thieves stole its pipes, over seven years ago. Looking around, you notice that Joanne, like you, is similarly struggling to figure out where her house is located. The two of you start talking and notice that across the table, Harold is not at all struggling and has in fact figured out where he lives. Well this makes everything loads easier because you live next to Harold and Joanne lives three doors down from you. What is the name of the new person who lives in between you and why isn’t she here? Did we forget to ask her? Bill mentions that he called her but the number didn’t work. ‘Well that’s because she left her phone in a cab. Here’s her new number,’ mentions Joanne. Ryan, the group facilitator, asks everyone to paint their house–only their house–on their name tags.

As gorgeous as they may be, the trees are small and a bit tough to glue, and everyone is struggling a hair with attaching the trees to the model. Some are on the verge of throwing up their arms until Natania gets her trees arranged and glued perfectly. All of a sudden her name tag really does look like the Park and every stops working to admire what she’s done. Ryan holds up Natania’s tag and shows everyone how it can become a Christmas tree ornament, which is right around the corner.The jolt of electricity this sends through the room is palpable and everyone redoubles their efforts. Some, given the size of their hands or their age, struggle more than most but you notice that Ryan’s seating plan for the group–young-old-young-old–has encouraged a few young adults like Yesenia to lend a hand to the older participants on either side of them. This is a rare sight because there is a significant age divide in the community and much of the conflict around the future design of the Park hinges on the age-related activities that should be accommodated.

As people wrap up their micro-Parks, Ryan pulls them aside and takes a picture of them with their creation. They point proudly at their homes and tags. Some people have even used the baby blue felt to show the fountain working again. Usually, a photographer has to ask people to smile when they pose but it is striking that in this setting, a community planning meeting, no coercion or arm twisting is necessary.

At Public Workshop we are always tinkering away, developing new tools and methods for uniquely engaging citizens–young and old–in the design of the places they live. We having found that ‘making’ and ‘doing’ are transformative approaches for creating more meaningful participation/ learning, generating better ideas, fostering collaboration and building greater ownership around the design of a public space or a learning process. Our Place Tags are a very specific tool intended for a very specific point in a particularly unique community design process. They are not supposed to generate creativity in their own right. Instead they are about building connections, identity, conversation and have people start to ‘locate’ themselves in a place, and process. We have other making-oriented tools for generating ideas, exploring design possibilities, establishing priorities, etc. that we would deploy later around a place like Benson Park. Although they are still largely in the prototype phase (we are working on transforming them and their accompanying tools into a larger kit), we love the elegant simplicity of the function, interaction, and outcome of the Place Tags.

Thanks to always awesome Ryan Hyde, one of our Public Workshop Community Design Fellows, for leading the co-development of the Place Tags. An undergraduate in Industrial Design at the University of the Arts, Ryan is an incredibly skilled wood worker (his guitars are amazing) and a super nice guy.

With 225,000 visitors and 700 plus returning volunteers from all walks of life; unique access to 300 plus public spaces, pieces of hidden infrastructure, architecture and design programs in all five boroughs of New York City; and partnerships with over 125 cultural organizations, openhousenewyork is uniquely positioned to facilitate everyone from your mailman to the Mayor simultaneously experiencing and talking about the role design plays in making New York City great. It is simply amazing that they accomplish this on one weekend each year with no more than a staff of three. openhousenewyork‘s lifeblood–the diverse collection people, places, buildings and organizations–is also its weakness. To help openhousenewyork better leverage these strengths, giving identity to the incredible volunteers, organizations and buildings that make it such a wonderful asset in New York, Public Workshop developed I AM OHNY!.

Deployed in stages as part of openhousenewyork‘s 10th anniversary celebration, the first phase of I AM OHNY!, simply begins to bring to light the incredible diversity of people, places and stories behind the organization.

Want to read a few? Click >>HERE<<.

Thanks to Giacomo Ciminello who helped develop the initial I AM OHNY! proposal which took the form of a Sappi Ideas That Matter grant.

Can you breakdance?

With 40,000 vacant lots, a crumbling public school system, a huge population of disaffected youth, an excellent Mayor and one of the most forward thinking water departments in the United States, Philadelphia is a city full of need AND opportunity. Throw in the City’s proximity to other places of similar needs such as Trenton, Camden, and Baltimore, as well as a host of highly motivated people doing great things in the City and there you have the basic reasons why Philadelphia is now the permanent home of Public Workshop. And you may or may not have heard but we want to make Philadelphia THE national model for how we engage young adults in the design and making of their cities. To do this, to meet the City’s tremendous needs and to truly have impact, Public Workshop needs a small army of breakdancing design-education-leaders. We couldn’t be more pleased to welcome our first class of Philadelphia-based Public Workshop Community Design Fellows, errr breakdancers. Say hello to Navjot Banwait, Emily Howe, Tyler Scholl and Stefanie Tomarchio. Their involvement will allow us to better grow our existing programming and launch some exciting new tools, and programs this spring. Simultaneously they will be part of the prototyping and launch of Basic Training, our Community Design Leader bootcamp–a crash course in social entrepreneurship, designer leadership, teaching, ‘doing’ and maybe even a little breakdancing to boot. Over the next couple of years, Basic Training  will allow us to have a significant positive impact in Philadelphia and then begin to extend our unique skills, tools and innovative approaches to other cities in a sustainable fashion.

Thus far we can report no diminishment of spring in users’ steps or a preponderance of sad, uninspired looking structures. Quite the contrary.

Interested in ordering some? Send us an email- info@beabuildinghero.com

Build-It! Mini-Discs

12″ diameter

1/4″ thick

20 Build-It! Mini-Discs for $35, shipping and tax not included

All Discs are laser cut from double walled cardboard with 50% recycled content, are 100% recyclable and are fabricated on-demand for Public Workshop in Charlottesville, VA by Cardboard Safari.

COPYRIGHT 2012

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 webpage (click >>HERE<<)? Needless to say there are few that are more deserving of this than these superstars and wow-o-wow we are smiling. Last summer, these #teendesignerheroes were a part of the ‘doing’ boot-camp that we have led for the past four years for the fantastic folks at the Chicago Architecture Foundation at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin. As the article states, from day one we accomplish great things by through learning by doing; building again and again; and failing magnificently. Pencils and rulers are prohibited, capture the flag, hide-n-go-seek and 18 hour days are required. As Jeisson so aptly puts it,

“Prepare yourself to build, tear down, build, tear down, and build again so that finally you can have what you may call your first draft. Sound tough? You’re telling me! Thankfully, while it is challenging, it’s also one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.”

The results? Well, in five short days, from scratch–including identifying the problem, user research and siting the resulting structure–the #teendesignheroes design and build structures like the one below.

More importantly, this unique process and experience has a profoundly transformative impact on the everyone involved–#teendesignheroes, teachers, visitors and our generous hosts at Taliesin. If you haven’t already done so, make sure you read some of the #teendesignheroes‘ posts in which they report and reflect upon the experience. We assure you they are quite moving and worth the read. In particular, have a look at Diana’s post. Unlike most of this year’s #teendesignheroes, she hadn’t taken any architecture classes in high school–and was initially very tentative as a result–but our unique design process helped her accomplish amazing things.

Click >>HERE<< to read more.

Incredible thanks to the outstanding Katie Koch of Project Interaction who was one of our Teaching Fellows this year and designed the graphic treatment for great image that you see at the top of the Fast Company article; Daniel Splaingard who is a Rose Fellow and was our other remarkable Teaching Fellow; Victor Sidy and everyone at Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture; and the folks at the Chicago Architecture Foundation–Jen Masengarb, Jean Linsner and Krisann Rehbein–who do incredible work and make this experience possible every year.

Lastly, thanks to Melanie Kahl of Perkins + Will in Chicago for spending a day with us last summer and for writing the article. We don’t mind saying that you rock.

Public Workshop was asked by the great folks from CURA: Making Mega-Projects Work for Communities (a project of McGill University’s School of Urban Planning) to lead one of our chocolate cake master planning workshops (previous example) at the neighborhood’s subway station today to start generating conversation, awareness and questions around the impending project. CURA is working with Concertation Interquartier (CIQ), an inter-neighbourhood coalition of community groups working with the mega-hospital to better integrate the hospital into the surrounding neighborhood.

Why cake? Have a look at this interview, courtesy of OpenFile with Public Workshop’s Alex Gilliam to learn more:

Smartly stationed in between a number of bus stops and the Vendome Metro station, the construction of the neighborhood in chocolate cake grabbed the attention of harried commuters, hesitant passersby and hungry teenagers like few other things can. In fact, one of the big successes of the cake building workshop was the great cross-section of the population that we engaged on Friday morning. Young, old, powerful, homeless, families, individuals, local, and immigrant helping explore the design of the future of the neighborhood……..how often does that happen at your typical community planning meeting?

A few moments in the early morning commuter rush clearly stood out-

There was the Italian owner of a nearby coffee shop owner who stopped by to make sure his business could be easily seen on the model; the well-appointed hospital administrator in her blue suit with her hands covered in chocolate cake and icing, building away; the council member using the finished chocolate cake model to emphatically explain to reporters from the CBC the need for improved bike lane infrastructure in the neighborhood; chocolate-cake-emboldened urban planning students really connecting with passersby and participants ; the gaggles of teenagers getting off at the nearby bus stop and coming over for a closer look; and lets not forget the McGill University cheerleaders who created a special ‘Vendome would be great if…….’ cheer, on the spot.

And of course there were also the really thoughtful ideas for neighborhood future neighborhood improvements that we gathered through our ‘Vendome would be great if…..’. Although they by no means represent a detailed sampling of the neighborhood’s wishes, they do start to identify some strong trends that CURA and CIQ can use to initiate meaningful conversations between the community and the hospital about the future of the neighborhood.

Incredible thanks to Jason Prince, Molly Johnson, McGill Urban Planning students and others from CURA and CIQ for inviting Public Workshop to lead the event and doing a fantastic job of making the entire workshop a great success.

Curious what they had to say about the neighborhood and chocolate cake?

The event was well-attended by the news media. Have a look at the links below:

The initial Canadian Broadcasting Corporation story: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2011/11/18/mtl-cake.html

A story by OpenFile with a very good 3 minute video: http://montreal.openfile.ca/blog/curator-blog/exclusive/2011/future-vendome-discussed-using-chocolate-cake

More from the CBC: http://news.sympatico.cbc.ca/local/qc/oversized_cake_gets_ndg_residents_talking_/7e2e1c1e

CBC TV: Some more video… http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/Canada/Montreal/1305551527/ID=2169000880

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2011/11/18/mtl-cake.html

Want to see more pictures from the event?

Are you a Building Hero?

We are super excited to announce that our Build-It! Discs are now in production and available for purchase. We have a shiny website for the Discs designed by our friend Sage Brown too.

http://beabuildinghero.com/

All of our Build-It! Discs are made from recycled paper, are entirely recyclable and fabricated in the United States. We are also offering Build-It! Workshops and Curricula.

Phew and that’s just the half of it.

It should also be mentioned that our superstar friend and former intern Brenda, responsible for helping us create a number of ground-breaking projects including Shadelab, is no longer a #teendesignhero. Brenda turned 21 in September…..Happy Birthday Brenda, you rock!

Believe it or not, October is shaping up to be even busier but a heck of a lot of fun. Four major projects launch this month, we’re working on a new website for Public Workshop (thank goodness) and here are a few of our upcoming workshops and presentations. Please stop by and say hello!

October 2nd          BMW/Guggenheim Lab New York City, 1-4 pm

For more information click here

October 8th        Recharging Art + Public Design Austin, TX, 9-3 pm

For more information and to register click here

October 8th        Old Bakery Idea-Thon Austin, TX, 4-7 pm

For more information and to register click here

October 10/11th Design In Action Conference Philadelphia, PA

For more information and to register click here

October 15th      openhousenewyork Weekend at the Center For Architecture  New York City 12-4 pm

For more information click here

October 15th      BMW/Guggenheim Lab New York City, 8-10 pm

For more information click here

October 16th      openhousenewyork Weekend at DreamYard  New York City 1-3 pm

For more information click here

November 16th McGill University Montreal

In the coming weeks, in three different cities, we will be leading a variety of building workshops with our Build It! Disks. The focus of each workshop and the reason for using the Disks is varied:

In Austin, our workshops are focused on placemaking- using the Disks to help people explore how a variety of underutilized public spaces might be used differently, building collaboration amongst a disparate group of stakeholders and literally using the highly visible nature of the building of the structures to raise public awareness about the ongoing re-design of those spaces.

In Philadelphia the we will be using the Build It! Disks to introduce new methods for teaching students design and engaging visitors at architecture-related cultural institutions.

During the openhousenewyork Weekend, we will use the Disks to provide a means of gathering people young and old to ‘test’ a couple of different public spaces, while providing a mechanism for talking about the local architecture and community.

Regardless of their focus, each will be an exceptionally good time. All are open to the public but you must register for a couple of them to participate.

Come build with us!

7th October Austin, Texas

OFF THE GRID: Recharging Public Art + Design

Old Bakery Idea-Thon

9th October Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Design In Action Conference

15th October New York, NY

Open House New York Weekend at the Center For Architecture, time TBD

16th October

Open House New York Weekend at DreamYard, 1-3pm

Why such an immediate reaction?

Paul and RJ are certainly great, thoughtful guys but there is nothing in their backgrounds that would make them uniquely disposed to wanting to inspire others in Philadelphia to re-design and improve their neighborhoods. Other #teendesignheroes such as Diana have talked at length about the incredible sense of empowerment that our unique design-building methodology–which doesn’t require specific architectural knowledge to make something wonderful–imparts on them. I think that the methods definitely had a big impact on Paul and RJ’s outlook but there is one other unaccounted for factor– feedback. Working on a relatively heavily trafficked corner in North Philadelphia meant that we were getting immediate feedback from passersby and community members. Paul and RJ didn’t have to wait to hear about the impact of their actions, they got to see and hear people’s reactions to their work in real time. Indeed, in this rough, post-event video they recount their amazement at the responses from passersby, especially the father who stopped and let his little girl build.

What if we create a corps of Philadelphia #teendesignheroes who design and build improvements in the public spaces, vacant lots and schools in their neighborhoods throughout the City?

Why shouldn’t we create a corps of #teendesignheroes who not only take the lead on designing and building the bus stops, benches, shade structures, playground equipment, and planters that Philadelphia so desperately needs, but in the process, inspire a much larger city-wide movement of neighborhood self-improvement?

Last week I spoke in San Francisco at SOCAP (an international conference on social entrepreneurship) on the importance of prototyping new behaviors that enable people to solve our cities’ most pressing challenges. When we think of disruptive technologies we overlook youth, most immediately imagining such things as iPhones or the combustible engine. However, youth are incredibly powerful as a disruptive technology, modeling behaviors and approaches that either adults have forgotten or didn’t think was possible, and I have seen this time and time again in my work.

The students at the Sunshine School decided to improve the condition of their school when nobody else would, breaking through their teachers’ immobility and frustration with the school district. My 19 year old superstar former intern Brenda, helped model how youth and community could be uniquely incorporated into a Chicago architecture firm’s design practice to help it create better buildings and better neighborhoods- creating an unprecedented business model. And of course there is the 24 year old at the National Building Museum who decided to build something even more impressive out of Legos because she saw a five year old make something wonderful.

If all of this is true, give me one good reason why shouldn’t we put Philadelphia youth at the forefront of designing, building and improving Philadelphia?

And I haven’t even begun to describe the incredibly positive impact this can have on #teendesignheroes academic achievement, sense of empowerment and self-worth……..

Incredible thanks to the Slought Foundation, The Village For Arts and Humanities and the Dennis Oppenheim Studio for making these workshops possible.

Photo Credit: www.galleyboys.com , from the documentary, ‘Deathbowl To Downtown’, on the history of skating in New York City.