Did you miss the opening party for The Department of Making + Doing on May 11th? It was great but not to worry, here are some pictures from the event. The branding and space design for DM+D was created by Public Workshop and PlusUs, DM+D’s awesome graphic designer-in-residence. Check out the fantastic fundraising system/wall that our Building Heroes created to help them raise money to launch the bench building micro-business! Genius! People also seemed to have a heck-of-a-good time building with our Build-It! Disks.

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 from across the City will hone their design, fabrication, marketing, collaboration, and leadership skills by launching a micro-business to design, build, market, and sell one product that improves public spaces, schools, or neighborhoods in Philadelphia. The 2013 team–our first team–is focusing on creating benches. 

The Building Hero Project is an outgrowth of Tiny WPA, a program initiated by Public Workshop that places young adults at the forefront of stimulating community engagement and civic innovation in Philadelphia (and elsewhere) by empowering them to design and build improvements to their schools, public spaces, and the micro-infrastructure in their neighborhoods. Every one of our Tiny WPA projects acts as a mini-bootcamp, identifying young adults who are even more passionate and hungry than most to have a positive impact on their neighborhood and city. For us to truly be able to support and leverage this growing number of young adults into being effective leaders and civic design innovators in their communities, we need a self-sustaining mechanism for providing more focused leadership training, skill building, and team building than our on-the ground projects typically allow. With our new making-oriented civic innovation workshop, The Department of Making + Doing, we are now able to bring these young adults from across Philadelphia together and provide the space, tools, and sense of ‘team’ that helps create a ‘culture of greatness’, ultimately empowering them to do great things in our city.

Our inaugural team has been meeting regularly on a weekly basis for the past six weeks and is in the process of refining the design of their benches; tweaking their bench building process to be more participatory while still resulting in a beautiful product; developing business plans and other business infrastructure; testing their building process by teaching others how to create the benches, including execs from Leadership Philadelphia; creating a variety of self-funding mechanisms (including a Kickstarter Campaign); and starting to identify, and reach out to local experts for help.

EVERYTHING is being bootstrapped. Public Workshop isn’t getting paid, the Building Heroes aren’t getting paid……..we all believe in this so much, we are all simply doing everything we can to make it happen.

Want to support or help out The Building Heroes?

The team is already on its way, creating simple yet savvy fundraising mechanisms such as this ingenious donation wall but they could really use the following:

Monetary donations for: pizza and bus/subway travel
Monetary or tool donations: two cordless drills, orbital sander, planar, joiner, japanese saws, tape measurers, belt sander, clamps
Expertise: video production, modern furniture business, business development, marketing
Materials: sand paper, wood, paint, stains, and polyurethane
Social media cheerleaders for their project + upcoming Kickstarter campaign

Interested in helping out? Send me an email and I will put you in touch with one of The Building Heroes: alex@publicworkshop.us

Who are our incredible 2013 Building Heroes? 

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 last summer with eleven teenage women and our awesome partners– Demoiselle 2 Femme (D2F) and Latent Design –on the South Side of Chicago. It’s worth noting that given the format and audience, I don’t really get to talk about T-awannda P., D2F, or Latent Design but simply put, they are amazing and we can’t wait to head back this summer and work with them again.

Teenage women with power tools ARE our most powerful tools for stimulating community engagement + civic innovation.

Watch the video to find out ‘why’, to discover the reason that Jania is smiling, and learn about some of the fundamental tactics that we use in TinyWPA to empower youth, communities, and designers to do amazing things.

Please share this video! Although the project featured in the story has won a number of awards, everyone should know about what these young ladies accomplished.

I’m not a person who really “gets out there”. I’m not an out there person, I’m a shy person. I’m not really a person to take charge, I like to spend time alone. That all changed when I became a building hero. All of a sudden I am out there, I am an out there person, and I am taking charge. A “building hero” is not just a title you are given when you join a TinyWPA project, it’s something that you earn. Something that you achieve through honest hard work. How did I start? I was introduced. Sitting there, I was a little shy, maybe feeling awkward, maybe I didn’t want to be there. Then I met my group at our workshop. Every Sunday we meet up and talk about kick starting or how to make our benches better. Everyone works together and it’s just so fun that sometimes I don’t want to leave. Once I got accustomed to it, it was just like walking straight into home and into routine. We started on building our benches. Each one hand made and unique, no two ever the same. I was proud when I put together my first part of the bench. I never used a drill, or a saw, or a jig (a tool which helps you cut perfect angles in wood) before. It was nice to expand my horizons!

Last Saturday on 4/20/13 we had ten visitors from Leadership Philadelphia at our little workplace, The Department of Making + Doing at 3711 Market St. Of the people that I worked with, one was a cop, one worked for Comcast, and another was a lawyer. It was great because they stepped out of their comfort zones to step into our little world of wonders. Learning how to use their hands to create something wonderful, something that takes a lot of time, love, and care. I was proud because, they came to learn from me, just a sophmore in highschool. They learned what it was like to be a building hero, and why I’m so proud at what I do. We just don’t build things to sell, we build things to take a step forward to the future and make things better. We are the people who dispell the broken window effect, we are the people who say “There’s an empty lot? Why not make it into a park?”, and we are the people who never say “We can’t”. We are building heroes. Are you?

Alexa E.

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 have our #TinyWPA teens design-build ‘green’ adventure playground challenges at Smith in 2013 has just won a significant grant from the Delaware Green Building Council and the U.S. Green Building Council. In fact Greenbuild, USGBC’s massive annual green design conference, will be in Philly in 2013 and our adventure playground project will be the conference’s legacy project. This presents a huge opportunity to not only build one of the only permanent adventure playground installations in the country, but to leverage the incredible reach of Smith Playground, DVGBC, USGBC, and Greenbuild to stimulate a much larger conversation about green building techniques, risk, play, learning, and the role of youth in making their cities better places to live. This project builds on the huge response to pop-up adventure playground that we design-built last fall with hundreds of teenagers, young designers, children, and parents in the very center of Philadelphia.

But wait, there’s more! We also have received support to do another #TinyWPA project working with teens and a community group in the Olde Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia to design and build secretly playable park furniture. This furniture will provide needed amenities for the pocket park, help bridge the significant generational divide in the neighborhood, and help reframe the role of some of some of the typically vilified teenagers in the community.

So while we have a ways to go before we can say that we have met the desire of Jon and many other’s to have youth-built adventure playgrounds all over Philadelphia, we are pleased with what’s in store for 2013 and can say that these two projects represent the first manifestations of conversations with many different potential partners to do more of this type of work.

In the meantime, if you live in Philly, take your kids to Smith Playground. They have some great facilities including a 100+ year old wooden slide and their staff are simply amazing.

Did you catch the Slate Magazine article about risk and playgrounds that obliquely referenced our pop-up adventure playground, referring to it as an ‘exception’ and ‘an amazing project’? The article clearly hit a nerve and led to our post describing our pop-up adventure playground getting over 12,000 hits in three days.

Want to help out with our #TinyWPA adventure playground build at Smith Playground?

Send us an email- alex@publicworkshop.us

Want to see who else is on the list and see some interesting stats that they’ve compiled about the design-for-social-good movement? Head on over to www.publicinterestdesign.org to see the full list and related infographics.

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 collaboration and space will allow the four organizations to connect unprecedented skills, tools, and ideas to incubate innovative civic solutions and engaging educational programming with diverse communities in Philadelphia.

The civic tinkering space and collaborative programming will be collectively known as The Department of Making + Doing.

When it opens to the public this fall, the space and its diverse programming will also be a tremendous resource to schools, communities, and other civic innovators in Philadelphia. The ‘city’ is the classroom and laboratory of the 21st century, and The Department of Making + Doing—with its unique facilities and expertise—will serve as an important place for young and old to work together to creatively address Philadelphia’s challenges.

For Public Workshop, these incredible partners and facilities—including having access to NextFAB Studio’s new 21,000 square foot location at 20th and Washington, opening in October 2012—will be valuable assets for current and future endeavors, including TinyWPA, the Citizen Scientist Project, and working to create innovative participatory design and learning tools such as, Place Tags, chocolate cake masterplanning, and Build It! Discs. In short, The Department of Making + Doing is an important part of Public Workshop’s efforts to make Philadelphia THE national model for how we meaningfully engage youth in the design of their cities.

Although it will still be a few months before everything is fully up and running, the paperwork has been completed and the organizations couldn’t wait to share this exciting news. Incredible thanks goes to Dan Schimmel at Breadboard and Evan Malone at NextFAB for presenting the initial opportunity to Public Workshop and The Hacktory.

Want to learn more about the four organizations?

www.breadboardphilly.org
www.thehacktory.org
www.nextfabstudio.com

‘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 in this country, rich or poor, one would be hard pressed to find teenage ladies working with their neighbors to not only identify but also design and build neighborhood improvements. And yet, in late July and early August, there I was working 18 hour days with T-awannda Piper and Katherine Darnstadt, watching with amazement as eleven teenage women with power tools had an electrifying impact on the area surrounding one street corner in the Roseland neighborhood of Chicago. Through the Building Hero! Workshop (very similar to our Tiny WPA format) that I designed and lead for Demoiselle 2 Femme, these teenage ladies were tasked with crowdsourcing the highest use for a vacant lot given to us by the adjacent church and designing and building a solution in two weeks(!). Honestly, we didn’t expect to end up building something as substantial as a playground but as you can see from my daily reflection or T-awannda’s or the ladies’, none of us fully realized the community’s response to these young ladies with their power tools design-building improvements to a vacant lot on this particularly rough corner of the South Side.

Suffice it to say, this was one of my most moving projects of the past couple of years. And while I can’t wait to go back and do it again next summer, I am so pleased that the ladies are continuing to get some incredible, well earned recognition for their work. Most recently they received the Grand Prize in the Space In Between Placemaking Contest run by Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council. This was not a ‘small potatoes’ contest, in fact, their work beat out 44 other projects with some pretty significant organizations behind them to win the competition. We are so proud of the ladies and grateful to have the opportunity to work with Demoiselle 2 Femme and Latent Design–two of the best clients and collaborators that we’ve worked with in a long time.

Want to read a little bit more about the project and why I think that teenage women with power tools are our most powerful instigators of community engagement and civic innovation? Click here.

Check out the nightly news video on ABC’s Chicago affiliate about the project.

And in case you missed the other media coverage about the project, here are links to articles in the Chicago Tribune and the Sun Times.

We are happy to report that our Tiny WPA team is nearly finished with the first phase of a shade canopy for a farmer’s market in North Philadelphia. Design-built for our friends and collaborators at Philly Earth and the Village For Arts And Humanities, the canopy (when planted with vines in the Spring) will provide shade and a place for Philly Earth’s weekly farmers market, when teens from the neighborhood sell vegetables that they have grown in Philly Earth’s garden. Phase two of the project will include making the canopy a bit more dense, growing vines, landscaping the lot, and design building integrate benches that can double as surfaces for selling vegetables/goods, seating, and maybe even play equipment. The canopy was design-built by a core team of twelve teens and young designers, with help from over forty kids from the Village For Arts And Humanities and the neighborhood.

In the past couple of days, the space has taken on a new life as our friends from Philly Painting have recently completed two murals on either side of the space. Many organizations and funders are currently grasping at straws, trying to define ‘placemaking’ and ‘vibrancy’. Between the canopy, the murals, and the Village’s vibrant youth after school neighborhood programming……….this is it in a nutshell, folks.

Incredible thanks to the entire staff at the Village For Arts And Humanities and Philly Earth for being fantastic project supporters and collaborators.

And congratulations and thanks to our core Tiny WPA team–John Hargraves, Tyler Scholl, Thuy Tran, Raheem Reeder, Margaret Waters, Mike Darfler, Jacob, Star, Tyree Scott, Rakeam, Jeb Lewis, and Kevin–for a job well done. Awesome.

Want to see more pictures of the project? Visit our Facebook page.

It’s going to be a few months before we really have the time to deeply share our experiences and insights from our Tiny WPA pop-up adventure playground that we design-built in early October at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Pop-Up Garden. Suffice it to say, without a hint of hyperbole, it was awesome, we are truly excited by the response (to Tiny WPA and the playground), and we couldn’t be more excited about what this means for the future of play, public space, education, and youth in Philadelphia……and elsewhere.

‘Want to see more pictures from the project? Visit our Facebook page.

In the meantime, we would like to thank everyone who made this such a success–through money, time, sweat, or cheerleading.

Pennsylvania Horticultural Society
Design Philadelphia
Science Leadership Academy
El Centro
Next American City
Hidden City
www.playgrounddesigns.blogspot.com
The Village For Arts And Humanities
Students from the Industrial Design Department at the University of the Arts, Drexel, Penn, Rutgers, and Philadelphia University

And special thanks to our core team of Mike Darfler, Jeb Lewis, Thuy Tran, Tyler Scholl, Ila Kumar, Renee Schacht, and Matt VanKouwenberg. AND our Interns, Christian Stefan, Alice Gunn, Santini Basra, and Ken Mascaro. We simply couldn’t have done it without you guys. You were incredible.

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 workshops. In just fifteen short hours, we worked with Rejean Houle’s amazing carpentry students at Job Corps to design and build three prototypes for seating that grows off the simple ‘infrastructure’ provided by bus stop sign posts. The team installed one of the prototypes and in the next month, the other two will be painted (by Job Corps’ painting workshop) and installed at the bus stops of community organizations in Flint. AND THEN three students from the team-Da’Shay, Antonio, and Heather-presented their work and hopes for how they would like to contribute to making their city better at a city-wide symposium hosted by the Flint Public Art Project.

Although this is only the beginning of our relationship with Job Corps and the Flint Public Art Project, this quick Tiny WPA project was notable for both how much we were able to do in such a short period of time and how much impact (on the students and the general sense of possibility) was derived in such a short period of time–this is a course record for us. We are floored by the reflections and sentiments share by Da’Shay, Antonio, Heather, and the rest of their classmates. Fifteen hours, a few power tools, and some public space, ladies and gentlemen. Fifteen hours.

Indeed, this is most certainly a testament to the value and importance of having fantastic community partners. Incredible thanks to Job Corps (Verona Terry and Rejean Houle), the Flint Public Art Project, ArtPlace for funding the workshop, and especially the teens for unhesitatingly jumping in, and completely inspiring us.

We can’t wait to come back.

Want to see more photographs?

Visit our Facebook page to see more process images.

Since launching Tiny WPA just four months ago, working with hundreds of youth and some great community organizations, we have design built four Tiny WPA community improvement projects in three cities–including two in Philadelphia. Tiny WPA is just one part of our larger work to redefine how youth and their communities participate in the design of their cities, but can’t help but smile from the incredible response from participants, their communities, and outsiders to Tiny WPA. The program has clearly touched a nerve and we are excited by the projects, partners, communities, and particularly the young adults that we are going to be working with in 2013.

Needless to say, we aren’t the only ones working hard to do great things in Philadelphia and are grateful to be a part of such an incredible group of people and ideas. In January of this year, we very intentionally chose Philadelphia as the permanent home, laboratory, and base camp for Public Workshop. Pick up a copy of the November issue of Philadelphia Magazine or visit them online (here) to learn more about some of the incredible people who are helping create ‘The New Philly’–51 of the many reasons that we decided to and are proud to call Philly our home.

Want to see some images from our first four Tiny WPA projects?

Farmer’s Market Canopy For Philly Earth And The Village For Arts And Humanities

Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Pop-Up Adventure Playground

Bus Stop Seating in Flint, Michigan

Pocket Park Playground in Chicago, IL

To be sure, I was pleased as punch but believe it or not, this hasn’t been the best thing about launching TinyWPA.

That moment came late in the afternoon, five days earlier, when Raheem, John, Thuy, and I were working diligently on the team’s benches (pictured above). Carefully chiseling notches, gluing the supporting struts, and designing as we went, a shared joyful intent of purpose descended over the group. For the first time, playful ‘smack talk’–a true sign of trust, mutual appreciation, and comfort–appeared. The value of this ‘smack talk’ when designing and building with teenagers cannot be understated. When this form of ‘play’ starts to appear, it typically means that the young adults not only feel a degree of general ‘safety’ with us (an important foundation for great things happening) but it translates into a larger confidence within the participatory design process to challenge our ideas and toss out their own. It represents a turning point. Indeed, for the first time we were a team–co-learning, designing, and building–and we were better individually and as a whole because of each person who was there. This is one key ‘snapshot’ of my vision not just for TinyWPA but also the future of learning and civic innovation.

To be frank, I didn’t expect this moment to come so soon and that afternoon I nearly had to step away from the building area and pinch myself to believe it was truly happening.

One of the most undervalued components of accomplishing fantastic things–and a cornerstone of growing TinyWPA and ensuring that it has great impact–is taking the time to build a culture of greatness. Cultures of greatness don’t come easily. One one hand they require a funder, city, or service provider to take the long view for impact–understanding the value of starting small and the tactic of eventually leveraging the talented team members that you take the time to grow and their successes to reach a much larger audience than you would be able to otherwise. Furthermore, developing a culture of greatness requires a distinct physical and/or mental space in which people believe they can accomplish things that others think are impossible; where there is a degree of social pressure and responsibility to one another that pushes everyone to do their very best; and a place in which people feel safe enough to ‘fail’.

That ‘pinch me’ moment with Raheem, Thuy, and John was the beginning of TinyWPA‘s culture of greatness and it shouldn’t have come so early because initially–given the constraints we were working with–the aforementioned pieces for creating one simply weren’t there. But there it was, a snapshot of the future of our work in Philadelphia (and other places too if TinyWPA expands to other cities and we create a movement, as I would like).

Then again, a lot of things surrounding the development of TinyWPA this summer have been surprising. Despite actually having little time to share the work, the response from potential collaborators, funders, and people I don’t even know has been incredible. People just seem to ‘get it’ and immediately recognize the potential on so many levels.

This fall we are excited to work with the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, our collaborators at the Department of Making + Doing, and others to develop the program and pursue funding to support a more comprehensive initiative. A proto-TinyWPA program in Chicago that we are creating for a client is going gangbusters and we are heading to Flint, MI in late October to do a micro-TinyWPA project with teens. Locally, Drexel University’s Office of University and Community Partnerships, the North 5th Revitalization Project, and community organizations surround Benson Park have all committed to doing TinyWPA projects in the coming year.

Perhaps most importantly, we are going to be working with the Village For Arts And Humanities to realize Tyree and Raheem’s desire to create a neighborhood repair and design shop , and launch a micro-enterprise around producing the benches pictured above. This is going to be a tremendous mechanism for growing our team and the culture of greatness around TinyWPA that will allow us to do amazing things, and ultimately make Philadelphia the national model for how we engage young adults in the design of their cities.

And while there are a lot of challenges ahead, this all means that pretty soon I will get to have ‘pinch me’ moments everyday and that makes smile more than you can possibly imagine.

Currently we are wrapping up the designing and building of phase one our main project, a market canopy for Philly Earth and community members who would like to sell things. We will be having an opening and celebration in late September. You should come!

Want to see more pictures from the project and learn about the process thus far? Click here.

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 and 20th on Walnut. Initially taking the form of a series of soaring mountainous islands and coves, the space will radically transform beginning on October 11th as families, children, and YOU collaboratively ‘build’ their own stories, play, and structures on and around these forms. Arising from simple materials that one can find at any hardware store, this engaging place making project explores the roles that ‘play’, a civic-oriented DIY culture, and young adults can serve in Philadelphia’s future. This project is part of Tiny WPA, a program initiated by Public Workshop that places young adults at the forefront of stimulating community engagement and civic innovation in Philadelphia by empowering them to design and build improvements to the City’s public spaces, schools, and micro infrastructure.

Please join us on October 11th and October 13th for unique participatory design-build activities for all ages; hours of tinkering, collaboration, and adventure; and conversations about the state of play in Philadelphia and the transformative roles our young adults can play in the design of our city. The pop-up playscape and tinkering space will be coming down with the Pop-Up Garden on October 16th, so you won’t want to miss these events and your chance to be a part of something great.

BUILDATHON!
October 11th
5.00 pm-7.00 pm

Design Philly Event
October 13th
10.00 am-2.00 pm

Don’t miss the great press that we’ve gotten for the project in Next American City and Hidden City. Stay tuned for a TV spot on WHYY and other articles coming soon.

Incredible thanks to the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and their staff for making this project possible. And while we have students from various Philadelphia schools have participated, we could not have done this without help from the staff and students at the Science Leadership Academy and El Centro.

‘How about growing a corps of citizen scientists?

Given our work helping create Shadelab, it’s probably not surprising that we think it’s a great idea.

What if these citizen scientists were also trained as green community design leaders, able to explain the importance of and advocate for these often relatively hidden projects within the context of the design of their neighborhood?

First of all, our hearty congratulations to Franco Montalto, a civil engineer, hydrologist, and professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia for receiving his Career Grant from the National Science Foundation this spring to investigate, ‘Integrated Assessments of the Impacts of Decentralized Land Use and Water Management Practices in Urban Ecosystems’. Needless to say, we are pleased as punch that Franco ‘won’ and that last summer, in the midst of assembling his proposal, he asked Public Workshop to be a part of his team for this important project. Over the next couple of years, we will be working with Franco; other team members at GrowNYC and Drexel University; and in communities in New York and Philadelphia to design a curriculum and advise on the creation of a prototype program for growing citizen scientists to measure the impact of distributed green infrastructure projects.

We think there is huge opportunity embedded within this project for social and civic innovation, as well as completely redefining the ‘classroom’ and STEM/STEAM education.

While work on the project is yet to begin, the curriculum will merge elements of ecology, urban design, technology, and community leadership training, and may evolve into a certificate program.

To be sure, the decentralized nature of these green infrastructure improvements that necessitate looking outside of traditional organizational structures for solutions and thus allows for tremendous opportunities for civic and social innovation, will also present unique challenges. In short, realizing the full opportunities for civic and social innovation will require that the citizen scientists feel like they are part of something special and of a group of people doing truly important work—this is hard to do across the expanse of a city or region, and seemingly disconnected projects and people. For these very same reasons, in our opinion, outside of committed or topically connected groups such as the lovers of a particular type of migratory bird, the promise of most crowd-sourced research projects has rarely been realized.

How many bioswale fan clubs have you encountered?

Of course this is part of the unique problem that green infrastructure improvements face, an essential point of the project, and one of the reasons why Franco’s project is so important.

How is Franco’s project different and why are we going to succeed? The concerted educational component is a key difference; we have some tricks up our sleeves; and are quite excited to work with such accomplished partners to tackle this unique challenge that has such important implications for the future of our cities and schools.