Colin Raney, Managing Director of IDEO’s Massachusetts Office:
IDEO is a design firm that works on a wide range of design problems from brand development, to product design, to process design.  Colin spoke to us about some projects that IDEO has worked on and how they apply “human-centered design thinking” to their work, attempting to understand and find “empathy” with people who are part of the design challenges they are addressing.

He feels that IDEO practices codesign, but doesn’t talk about it. He said, “Clients hire us for outcomes and impact, so they speak about their products and not as much about their processes.”  He’s particularly interested in codesign, however and in methods that ask questions of designers.  Design thinking, he says, suggests that anyone can be a designer; codesign also suggests this, and requires that members of a design process facilitate one another to be designers.

For live notes from Colin’s talk, check out our class notes: http://brownbag.me:9001/p/codesign13-Week11

Design Workshop with Anjum Asharia – Character Design and Media Making for the Claro Que Si hotline project
Anjum Asharia is a Program Director with Rev- and has joined our class this term as a project partner in the Rev-/BIC team.   Anjum led us through a workshop during class to become more familiar with the work of this project team and to engage us as participants in their design process and media making.

The team is developing a hotline based on New Day New Standard, produced by Rev- and DWU to serve as an information hotline for nannies and employers to learn about the labor rights that are a part of the 2010 New York Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights.

Anjum walked us through calling New Day New Standard, (646) 699-3989.  We each called from our own phones to experience the hotline as a caller and shared our thoughts about what we liked, what we didn’t like, and what is difficult to understand:

Some of our feedback:
what we liked: content
 is simple; quick to go from place to place; thought that the episode would be exciting; the main narrator, Christine’s voice and energy;

what we didn’t like: 
long quiet gap between choosing episode and hearing; 
doubted that the episode would be exciting; was good because we’re in a quiet place, walking through a city would be hard; would be useful if there were shortcodes to listen to episodes and bypass the menu;

what is confusing: a little confusing to have the pieces be called episodes but be about topics;

We spoke about the importance of the characters in New Day New Standard and then did a design exercise to imagine what the character for the BIC project, “Clara Que Si” might be like, taking 5 minutes to work independently, drawing a portrait of Clara and writing out what her age is, what she says, and what she sounds like.

The team will use these drawings and ideas to develop the script and character further.

Our final activity together was to contribute to the making of some of the content for the hotline!  Anjum introduced the story that we were contributing to.  The story is about bedbugs and she would record us as we made the sounds of bedbugs at a party.  Some of us made sounds of bedbugs whistling, others shouting excitedly, and others, eating.

*nom nom*

Click to see the Codesign Studio Class Syllabus: Week 7: Appropriation, Innovation, Bricolage, Design?

This week, we met at Urbano Project (http://www.urbanoproject.org/) in Jamaica Plain. Urbano occupies a large space separated into 2 parts, and when we arrive, there is a group of students working in the back classroom area and our class gathers in the front gallery space.  Stella, the Executive Director of the Urbano Project introduces the organization and Urbano staff describe the work displayedi n the gallery.

Risa spoke about the Narratives of Exclusion.  This is a series visualizing data around issues of equity and transportation.  At the time, there was public conversation about the 28 bus route that runs between Ruggles and Mattapan and research that revealed that communities of color spend 66% more time waiting for transit than other groups.  (See this article for more info about race-based transit inequity in Boston: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/massachusetts/2012/11/25/wide-racial-gap-exists-speed-boston-area-commutes/utDAVcJ9B6QUALUidI9DGL/story.html).

Working in pairs, groups chose statistics that resonated with them and selected materials, mostly repurposed found objects, to represent the data.  Risa talks about the projects as wearable data visualizations.  On display were a head piece, a shirt for 2, bracelet-like arm decorations, and a cape.

One piece, a shirt made from 2 shirts with silver, blue and yellow whistles attached, is a representation of the types of crime that are reported as occuring on MBTA trains.  Based on a pie chart from an annual MBTA crime report, the group created this wearable data visualization with silver whistles representing the most commonly reported crimes, non-payment of fare.  The blue whistles are related to stealing; the yellow whistles are a larger miscellaneous category – which includes violent crimes like rape.

While working on this project, the group reached out to the MBTA and met with them. They had a series of discussions with the planning department of the MBTA to understand how these issues were being addressed and their future plans. MBTA employees came to their exhibition and publicly acknowledged their work.

The youth went to Wake up the Earth (a celebration of the South-West corrdor) – a site of successful community organizing where the city had planned to build a freeway through what is now the south-west corridor. Through neighborhood organizing, plans were changed and community resources were built including parks.  It was an important moment for the group. They realized the impact of their project in the real world – imagine 600 whistles banging together and shining in the sun.

Check out Urbano’s Project Page and these video links to learn more about Urbano’s work:

• http://urbanoproject.org/projects.php
• http://www.barrfoundation.org/news/youth-make-voices-heard-and-vision-clear-through-the-arts
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uzQeDgLVe8&list=UU6dn3JCcjT-FIyLXf9rdh9Q

Workshop:: Video Interviews

The Urbano students joined us and we broke into small groups of about 6. The Urbano students guided us in interviewing one another using questions they had prepared.  We filmed one another using our mobile phones and shared the videos with the Urbano Project.

In our group, we choose a few questions from the list:

• What’s an interesting setting for a dream?
• What is a common theme for your dreams?
• If you could invent anything, without any rules or limitations, what would it be?
• What’s an important social justice issue for you; what would the world look like if that were not a problem?

Assemblage and Bricolage

After interviewing each other, we gathered in the classroom area and Eve Ewing, Program and Communication Manager at Urbano led us through a lesson on Assemblage and Bricolage including a hands-on activity to introduce us to the artistic process that Urbano uses.

Eve introduces appropriation as creative re-negotiation and bricolage as tinkering, learning by doing.  In the visual arts, appropriation is adopting or recontextualizing existing objects, texts, or images as art without significantly modifying them. Bricolage is creating work with whatever you happen to have on hand, especially everyday objects and unwanted items.  Assemblage is a kind of art where you are combining objects.  Eve shows examples of appropriation and bricolage.

Some examples of appropriation:

– Duchamp, Fountain (1917), left — when you take a urinal and recontextualize it, it becomes something else

– Sherrie Levine’s “Fountain” (1991), right — a urinal cast in gold;

– Sherrie Levine “After Walker Evans: 4” (1981) – took a catalog of Walker Evans’ images and photographed his images from a catalog; the estate of Walker Evans purchased all of the pieces in this series. (http://www.afterwalkerevans.com/)

Some example of bricolage – making these from whatever is handy

– Mark Bradford, “Strawberry” (2002). He’s from LA and his mom runs a beauty salon – he collected the neon posters he found around him and turned it into this piece. It’s a comment on the area he lived in; ‘strawberry’ is a slang term for a crack addict.

Urbano uses appropriation and bricolage – create working that involved boundary crossing and risk-taking. These techniques are about crossing the boundaries. We look to blur the distinction between what is art and what is an artist and what is art and what is every day life. Peace Line (2013) is an appropriated piece we made this summer.<

Hands-On with Urbano’s Artistic Process:

We’re doing an activity inspired by Erwin Wurm’s “One Minute Sculptures” in which he placed a person in a position with a set of object for 60 seconds.

– Two example of Erwin Wurm’s 1-min Sculptures. Images originally located at: http://publicdelivery.org/

We’re using 2 materials. One is the object you always have — your body; and the other type is objects we find in the studio.  We see examples appropriating other people’s bodies and using them in bricolage.

Instructions:

– Find a partner.  Decide who is going to be the sculptor and who will be the sculpture.

– Use items in the gallery to create a sculpture; try to defamiliarize yourself with the body and the object. Look anew at both.

– Create one iteration, step back, and adjust. Continue tinkering until you’re satisfied.

It was a great class.  Thanks to Urbano for hosting us and leading the lessons for the day. We’ll be using the Ladder of Feedback method in the future!

When you are designing a project for social justice, where do you start?

In this workshop, we practice value-based design, a method that helps us to design for large scale social impact and to relate this directly to how we plan and implement projects. We envision the impacts we’d like to contribute to in the world and the values we bring with us into our work as the first steps in this design process. As individuals, this method helps us to express our connection to our projects on a personal level and to prevent burnout as we are able to identify work that resonates with our values and to set aside work that doesn’t. As a team, this method helps us to identify shared values and to make design decisions based on our shared vision instead of personal preferences.

At the last Codesign Studio, Bex and Willow took the class through an hour-long workshop to identify our individual values and to design our projects and approach around shared values.

This workshop is inspired by Monica Sharma’s work in transformational leadership for large scale system shift. In this article, she describes the framework of the methods she shares for this kind of work. Connecting with our personal values and designing based on values is a key component. [Sharma, Monica. “Contemporary Leaders of Courage and Compassion: Competencies and Inner Capacities.” Kosmos Summer 2012.]

Individual Values

Purpose
Uncovering our core values gives us better understanding of our own purpose and desire in the world. Doing this exercise with teammates is a great way to connect to each other’s inspiration.

Process
(3 min) Select one person in the room to work these questions with:

Share something you’ve worked on that you had some role in designing.

Ask the following questions:

• What did you envision as success for that project? Often people will dissemble, and say it wasn’t a success. People will also commonly talk about the activities of the project, things they did, instead of what the vision was of the project. So:
• Ask them to imagine that it WAS a success. What is happening in the world then? How are people living? What is the quality of life?
• Drill to one word. That’s the value you were working from. The value you represent. The word should not be an action or process (manifestation, collaboration, interaction, etc), but what people feel like if they can act or work in that way (joy, justice, inclusion, health, etc).

(12 min) Now, break into pairs. If there are project teams in the room, ask people to work with someone in the same team and ask each other the questions above.

(at 6 min) Remind people to switch

Reportback
Have each person say their value when you reconvene. If you can, write these somewhere that will be visible for your team as you continue to work together.

Value-Based Design

Purpose
Designing a project with the larger purpose in mind helps to think big and understand that your actions connect to your visions of social justice. It also helps your team to recognize shared values, a great starting place for connecting when you have to make difficult design decisions.

Overview (5 minutes)
In this method, we design with our teams first by developing shared understanding of the impacts we want to see as a result of the work we do together. These will be large-scale and will likely relate to values we identified in the Individual Values exercise. In this exercise, Impacts, longterm sustained state change.

Because we can’t implement impacts directly, we continue to design our work into pieces of work that we can implement. We divide these pieces into three categories: Inputs, Outputs, and Outcomes.

Process
Share the above graphic.

Go through an example, here is an example of how we might have used this methodology in developing Codesign:

Ask what desired impacts of Codesign are:

• Impacts – sustained state change. – What do you think the intended impacts of codesign as a method are? Empowered and equal engagement.

Ask what some inputs, outputs and outcomes are of Codesign:

• Outputs – collaborative workshops
• Inputs – YOU! Partners, us, this room, MOUs, etc
• Outcomes – A change, but requires continued effort to maintain – Such as social relationships, people try it and don’t keep it up

We tend to fill these three categories with information in a nonlinear way — recognizing an Output may surface desired Outcomes and Inputs. Broadly, we design right to left and implement left to right.

Project Design (25 min)
Now practice the value-based design methodology with project with your team. If you are at an early stage in your work together and you haven’t yet identified or selected a project you will work on, you can begin by taking the various partner’s organizational values into consideration. Broadly, what are the impacts that your team’s members envision?

Before completing the exercise, have each group fill in at least 2 points under each section.

Wrap It Up
Reportback (15 min)
Ask people to share their process. Try using the Green/Yellow/Red method and ask each group to share one Green – a thing that was easy or clear; Yellow – one thing that was challenging or that they learned something from; and Red – something that was difficult or a block.

If the teams went to different parts of the room, have everyone tour around. Document the work of each group.

• Intelligent Mischief: http://intelligentmischief.com/2013/08/09/meet-intelligent-mischief/ (Terry Marshall)
• Design Studio 4 Social Intervention: http://ds4si.org/ (Ken Bailey)
• Vida Urbana / City Life: http://clvu.org/ (Mike Leyba)
• Spare Change News: http://sparechangenews.net/ (Vincent Flanagan; Aditi will present on behalf of Vincent)
• REV-:  http://www.studiorev.org (Marisa Jahn and Anjum Asharia; Rodrigo will present on behalf of Marisa and Anjum)
• Brazilian Immigrant Center: http://www.braziliancenter.org (Lenita Carmo and Danielle Villela)
• The Urbano Project: http://www.urbanoproject.org/ (Stella McGregor and Risa Horn)
• ZUMIX: http://www.zumix.org/ (Lucia Duncan)

Intelligent Mischief: http://intelligentmischief.com/2013/08/09/meet-intelligent-mischief/ (Terry Marshall)
Intelligent Mischief (IM) started up in June as a hacklab for creative civic engagement.  Terry has 15 years experience in labor, youth, community organizing around various issues. IM is a place he created to house crazy ideas and move organizing forward.

Terry grew up in Boston and his family is from Barbados. He was an organizer at SEIU 1199, involved in the national health care struggle, now known as Obamacare.  Terry noticed that young people weren’t involved in the campaign and that campaigners were not talking to young people in their own language.  He and his team came up with an idea to open mic events mixing hip hop, spoken word, personal stories, and music, focused on access to health care. IM took this project on a city-wide tour, in part after seeing the Tea Party town halls. They asked “what would our community’s Town Halls look like?” He shows a 6 minute video about this work: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VR7Yn-CzBI?

IM is about mashing up culture and politics. They are currently being housed by the Future Boston Alliance (http://www.futureboston.com/). In November and December they are going to partner with Future Boston Alliance to run a series of panels and a creative hackathon around ‘reimagining blackness’ in light of Trayvon Martin’s murder, the Zimmerman verdict, and Stand Your Ground laws, as well as the mobilizations by Dream Defenders. The goal is to have a hackathon, but with less reliance on programmers, and more of a focus on bringing in community members and artists.

Q&A
Q: Can you talk about what that hackathon might look like?
A: The main two kind of programs we have are “What Ifs,” which are pop-up art interventions, and “creative hacks.” We want to incorporate technology, and also promote social entrepreneurship in the black community. Also, a hackathon might produce a cultural strategy. IM is part of the Center for Story Based Strategy, which uses narrative for social change. For example, at a previous event, we produced a mock boxing match to address questions around the Financial Crisis – “America vs Bank of America” – and that was our ‘app’ or solution.

Q: Is the collaborative idea about designing what the hackathon will look like, or just takes place at the event?
A: The collaboration is in designing the hackathon.

Q: Have you considered calling it something other than “hackathon”? Sometimes coders go to events that turn out to have corporate sponsors, a competition, and prizes, and end up unhappy because it’s not what they think of as hacking.
A: I usually use the term creative hacks.

Design Studio 4 Social Intervention: http://ds4si.org/ (Ken Bailey)
Next, Ken Bailey from DS4SI presents. They are a creativity lab for the social change sector. Ken was a fellow at the Center for Reflective Practice before it became CoLab (Community Innovator’s Lab). Together with Lori Lobenstine they wondered why there’s no space for research and development focused on civil society rather than the market, and decided to make one. Ken shows a slide about “Productive Fictions“: this is a way to get people inside the social sector to imagine new ways to approach social problems. They use imaginative fiction to get people think differently and imagine new possibilities. We have to imagine possible futures in order to create the world we want to create.

One productive fiction they came up with, was the Public Kitchen: http://ds4si.org/public-kitchen/. It engaged over 500 residents. If a kitchen was public like a library, what would that mean for our lives? What would that mean for what we spend on food? The first one was in Upham’s Corner, for 10 days. They had lots of partners and participants. They’re hoping to do another round this November.

Another project was Making Planning Processes Public (http://ds4si.org/blog/2013/4/9/making-planning-processes-public-in-uphams-corner.html), also happened in Upham’s Corner.  They took the planning processes and planning initiatives that are typically only discussed in community meetings and translated the information and brought it into a gallery space. They created a hub in a neighborhood to help people learn about what was going on in their backyard. They worked with artist Philippe Lejeune for this project. They’re trying to up their game around the aesthetic of social change. Ken says it’s important to give people a positive experience of the things you’re trying to communicate.

The next initiative, StreetLab: Upham’s (http://futureboston.com/about/our-pov/street-lab-uphams), is inviting residents, artists and makers to transform small public spaces in and around Upham’s Corner.

Ken explains that ds4si works all over, not just in Upham’s. They travel to facilitate workshops and spaces elsewhere.

Co-Design Class Challenges:
ds4si.org: making their site more interactive, in parallel with their creativity labs and social interventions. They’re a creativity lab for the social change sector, but their website isn’t very dynamic, they feel.
Democracy Time: can we create an app or social media tool that would capture the changing face of democracy – civil society breaking up and there is no central hub where we know we can get information for what it means to have a healthy society.
Other: they’re open to discussing other ideas people in the class have

Sasha: DS4SI was a partner with the CoDesign Studio last semester. What did you learn from the experience?
Ken: That studio helped creating Making Planning Processes Public. It gave people a way to think more about the complicated nature of advocating for certain things. The project was an interactive simulation of possible scenarios. We wish we had the data from the project (we didn’t receive that), and this time we’d like to see something all the way through.
Sasha: One of the things we will do early in the course, is develop MOUs to make sure everyone knows what project completion actually looks likes. How do you develop a process where everyone is clear about what is going to happen?

Vida Urbana / City Life: http://clvu.org/ (Mike Leyba)

Mike shows a video overview of their work: http://vimeo.com/74722901, and see http://vimeo.com/clvu/videos/all.

City Life/Vida Urbana is a 40-year-old bilingual, community organization whose mission is to fight for racial, social and economic justice and gender equality by building working class power through direct action, coalition building, education and advocacy. The video shows City Life organizing mobilizations at Bank of America around the housing foreclosure crisis.

Next he narrates this Prezi: http://prezi.com/dypu4p0h3eij/city-lifevida-urbana/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

They have a very specific focus, which is housing displacement. Housing displacement comes through a variety of means – gentrification, predatory lending. Their focus is where do people live, where should they live, and who’s moving in. They focus on tenant organizing.

Mike provides some history about the organization, from 1973, when Vida Urbana formed and supported Tenant Associations to preserve affordability, improve building conditions and resist displacement. Tenant Associations are about collective bargaining by renters. They’ve won 99 year affordability contracts, where the rent can only be raised 2% a year for 99 years. In 2007, they worked with tenants and homeowners facing foreclosure and eviction to stay in their homes after foreclosure, a method termed “sword and sheath” that has been replicated across the nation.

In 2013, they started an investor campaign: due to the foreclosure crisis, most foreclosure purchases were by speculators and management companies.
Challenge: Going against popular narrative that the housing foreclosure crisis is over.

Their approach:
– Housing is a human right
– Solidarity across, race, class, age and gender
– Desire to create long-term systemic change
– Overcoming systemic oppression
– Speaking one’s truth through a narrative framework

The project – we employ a collaborative approach in everything we do and are looking to work with students who want to advance social, economic and racial justice and gender equality.

Their Project: to address the cultural narrative that the housing and foreclosure crisis is over.  They propose various potential angles: Popular education, Media education, Institutional angle, Movement angle

Institutional angle: What tools can be deployed to change the narrative?
Movement angle: What tools needed to unite?
We have the voices, but how do we unite them?

They hold over 1100 cases in their database at one time and work a lot with Mass Housing Partnership. They try to tell the stories in a different way. Mike describes an eviction defense they conducted last week, a theatrical event where people chain themselves to the door to keep from being evicted. This generates visibility, media coverage, and pressure on the banks.

Q: Do you work mostly in East Boston or all over:
A: East Boston is quickly gentrifying. There’s an East Boston Tenant Association. There are also associations in various neighborhoods. There’s a Brockton tenant association that just started up.

There are encouraging stories there too. Antonio was a former rapper, three years ago he was facing foreclosure and now he’s still in his house, and he works on our staff. He made an album called “Bank Attack” that came out of protest songs.

Q: Are you working on any of the angles you mentioned in particular, or likely to?
A: Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac currently own half the mortgages. The FAHA is above them (link?). There have been multiple studies that show that it’s better for the community, taxpayers, to renegotiate the loans. Your taxes are paying for the eviction of working peopple, instead of renegotiation. They’re trying to get deMarco replaced, but it’s hard to get on the agenda with Syria front and center

Spare Change News: http://sparechangenews.net/ (Vincent Flanagan)

Aditi presents on behalf of Vincent Flanagan. Spare Change News (http://sparechangenews.net) comes out of the homeless empowerment project; they were founded in 1992 and have a twofold mission: to build skills and also create a livelihood for homeless folks. The stories are written by homeless people and allies.

Vendors buy the paper for 25c and sell it for a dollar. Since 1992, 3,000 people have earned money from the paper.

The second goal is to change the perception of homeless people in the area.
Other newspapers like this have been started elsewhere, the original founder also started a similar paper in Seattle.  Stories in the paper focus on the question, “How can we get people to think differently about homeless people?”

For the project, some of the challenges that Spare Change News would like to address:

• How can their ideas reach a greater audience, especially people under the age of 25?
• Through an informal survey, they found that 40-60% of people who buy the paper aren’t reading the stories or learning about the causes – how can we change that?
• They’re part of the North American Street Newspaper network, and also an international network, but would like to know more about how to leverage those networks.

Q: Do they help the homeless people sell papers to a company or an organization weekly rather than having to sell it daily?
A: The paper is published twice a week and they want the homeless person to sell the paper, it’s their way of making money. They have trainings to sell and are training vendors to talk about the stories.

There has been a collaboration in the past between Spare Change News and the Center for Civic Media, maybe 5-6 years ago, focused on building connections between vendors and the people buying the papers. Vendors, selling papers, included stickers with their papers with QR codes to link to individual vendor’s page or profile on SpareChangeNews.net so they could learn more about their individual story and build knowledge of vendors.

REV-: http://www.studiorev.org (Marisa Jahn and Anjum Asharia)

Rodrigo presents on behalf of Rev- a media/arts/design studio based in NYC.

_Message from REV-/Marisa “Hi Co-Design Studio! We are really excited for the opportunity to collaborate with you this semester. Students who are self-motivated; excited to collaborate; and interested in the way that art can impact social justice work would be a great fit for our team. Thanks for inviting us to pitch, and hope to work w/ you soon!”

_Followed by this brief video (approx. 1:30 min) of Marisa explaining New Day New Standard https://vimeo.com/72039615
As explained in the handout, we are seeking to produce a NDNS for Massachusetts, whose Bill of Rights is about to pass, granting the state’s 100,000 nannies, housekeepers, and careworkers basic rights like overtime pay, days of rest, etc.

_Followed by this similarly brief preview video (approx. 1:30 min) of Project NannyVan, a roving public art project accelerating the movement for domestic workers’ rights. https://vimeo.com/74250301
(Note that this is the debut of the ‘Nanthem’!!! (the nanny anthem)).

The MA hotline we produce in this class will be one of several tools that the NannyVan will share with parents and the broader public.  Rodrigo continues, Marisa is involved with the Nu Law Lab at Northeastern. The idea is that students in this class would partner with BIC, Nu Law Lab, and Rev- to work on the current campaign and advocacy around passing the Domestic Bill of Rights in Massachusetts. Students in this project will be expected to join some Wednesday evening meetings at BIC, together with the NuLawLab students.

Q: Are all the domestic workers female?
A: No, not all of them, but this project is focusing on nannies, which do tend to be mostly females.

Brazilian Immigrant Center: http://www.braziliancenter.org (Lenita Carmo and Danielle Villela)

BIC is located in Allston and has chapters in a few other places. Their mission is to empower and support their community around the issues of education, workers’ rights, and immigration. They have ESL classes, OSHA trainings, a domestic worker policy clinic, and an immigration clinic for people who are victims of Secure Communities. Natalicia, our ED, went to NYC in 2010 and brought this movement for a Domestic Worker’s Bill of Rights back to MA brining four organizations together to join the Massachusetts Coalition of Domestic Workers.

With the support of the National Domestic Worker Alliance, they are organizing for the MA Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Danielle explains that they want domestic workers to be visible to the world – it’s a job that nobody sees.

She also says “Our most important job will be after this law passes.” This is because they will have to educate people and assist. We have 2 research projects around this:
1. with OSHA around health and safety
2. in partnership with UMass boston and the sociological initiative foundation, they are researching domestic worker conditions.

They also have an exhibition in partnership with Mario Quiroz (http://marioquiroz.com/), to make domestic workers more visible. They have exhibitions in Quincy, Somerville, Hyannis. They have pictures of people of different ages, races, and type of domestic work, with a little about each person.

There’s no law protecting domestic workers so the BIC has a mediation clinic that helps to resolve disputes between domestic workers and their employers.

OSHA – Occupation, Safety and Health Administation (https://www.osha.gov) – is a government agency that can go to any workplace to monitor health and safety conditions. But, they can’t go to workplaces for domestic workers, because these are private residences. So, BIC is doing a survey of workers about the conditions of work, including chemical agents people use, safety, etc. Most workers do not have training or knowledge about the products they use. We also have OSHA training for people who work in construction, and there is also someone from the OSHA staff that will be working on this project.

Q: Are you trying to collect data? What type?
A: Yes, what kinds of products workers are using, how their job is all day — what are they doing during the day. One is about health and safety, the other questions are around — are they being paid, in cash.
We want to know type of product they use – like do they use windex and how long are they exposed to the product. This project is a partnership with UMass Boston. We plan to present this research in November.

The Urbano Project: http://www.urbanoproject.org/ (Stella McGregor and Risa Horn)

Stella is the founder and artistic director of Urbano and Risa is the Education Coordinator. Urbano is a youth arts organization located in Jamaica Plain in a 3000 sq. ft. brewery building. They work with professional artists and high school youth that address social justice issues. The work is all project-based and each year there is a theme.

They’re in their fifth year of operations; Stella is an artist and architect. Urbano began as an artist-run organization in the late 1980s, to explore the role that art can play in creating social change. This led her to integrate education as part of her artistic practice.

They have several groups: curatorial, performance, visual arts tracks. The public art for social change collective invited mexican artist Pedro Reyes to bring his project Palas por Pistolas (Shovels for Guns). He gathered handguns, melted them down, and created shovels. The shovels were used to plant trees in memory of victims of gun violence. The project culminated with a group pilgrimage to plant a tree in Stonybrook Park.

In 2011, they started focusing projects around a specific theme, and their theme was disobedience. They created a project called “The Freedom Trail on Trial” together with Gedeminas Urbonas (a professor and artist at MIT: http://act.mit.edu/people/professors/gediminas-urbonas/), around the Archive of Disobedience that his group was constructing. They did installations along the freedom trail raising questions of disobedience.

In 2013, the theme was manifestations of inclusions and exclusions in the landscape. It was a data visualization project using statistics around access to transport and they created sculptures around that data and went out into the public to education people about it.

This year, we’re working on the Emancipated City, reimagining Boston is a project to imagine what it means to be free. All year they will be doing collaborative installations in public spaces. The goal is to create models of a reimagined Boston and spark public conversation.

This summer in Dudley square they did a project with a vertical garden, to address issues of food justice and environmental racism. They also brought the piece to their space in Jamaica Plain – they usually have a culminating event there.

Teens did a performative piece that included elements of data visualization. People put red or blue dots onto performers’ bodies in agreement or disagreement with statements like “as a man, I should earn more than a woman,” “as an African-American, I have a better chance of going to jail than going to college” and “as a lesbian, I’ve earned my place in hell.”

Teens dressed up like Trayvon Martin and went out into Copley Square and when someone treated them badly they would give them a flier.
They are trying to reclaim a place of being important and capable.

Inspiration: bankofimagination.com
Interested in interactive and inclusive multimedia projects / participatory media.
See also: www.thewildernessdowntown.com; www.wechoosethemoon.org

Q: How do you actually want to collaborate with the class?
A: We want to make our web interface more interactive and participatory the same way that our projects are. We’d like to make sure that the community outside and people from elsewhere in the world could think about possibilities for what an emancipated city could look like, could look at the projects the students and artists are doing in real-time. That’s a possibility.

Q: So you’re looking for students with technical (programming) skills?
Or there could be other ways. We’re looking to get to the next level in terms of visibility. Our teens are exploring topics and issues and are also looking at how to be effective activitists and organizers.

ZUMIX: http://www.zumix.org/ (Lucia Duncan)

Lucia is the radio coordinator at Zumix. It is in East Boston by the Maverick T Stop. It was founded by Madeleine Steczynski in response to a wave of youth violence in East Boston. It started out as a music and youth development program and continues to do that. We moved to a renovated fire station on Sumner Street and have a beautiful space that plays a critical role in East Boston. It’s really the only arts and culture space in the area. Their mission is to empower youth to make music to have a positive impact on their lives and communities.

There are a range of solo and ensemble classes, performance, production, and there’s a radio station. The radio station started in 1995 as an AM broadcast (1630 AM) and you could hear it for two blocks. They are now applying for a low-power FM license (http://www.prometheusradio.org/Apply_LPFM_License). They stream 24 hours, have youth shows – mostly live shows – in the evening and adult community shows in the morning and daytime hours. They have training for DJs, audio storytelling, etc. We post these on our blogs and on PRX.

They’ve just begun podcasting shows with a member of BIC’s show, National Domestic Radio (https://www.facebook.com/nationaldomesticradio). It’s a monthly show by and for domestic workers.

Some challenges Zumix is facing:

• Getting visibility and listenership (even within the building, and the broader community)
• It’s a streaming station in a community that might not have as much internet access as other communities
• They have limited youth involvement in the station beyond doing their shows. Some students are traveling from other parts of the city. We could work on communication with youth about getting involved in the station.
• There’s only one staff person working on the radio station, so they are always looking for volunteers and interns.
• Youth are not as tuned into radio as they were in the past, so we have a challenge — is radio dead, how do we think about communicating and designing ways to connect an old technology to new ways of listening to keep it meaningful and connected to youth. Lucia teaches at East Boston high and when she plays radio stories, students always ask “where’s the picture?” We don’t listen to radio. They don’t think that radio is dead, but know that they need to think about communicating and designing ways to connect to new forms of listening.

There are two design/build projects that might be fun:

• One would be a space in the upstairs of their building where people often hang out. They’ve thought of building a computer housed in a fun looking old fashioned radio player. A wind up solar powered radio on her desk was great, kids would come and wind it up to listen.
• Another is a mobile sound booth where they could record stories in the community, go around East Boston, a neighborhood that’s rapidly changing. There are a lot of issues being discussed – like a casino being built, a lot of development is happening.
• Other projects could be to design marketing materials for the station, and getting youth involved in that to engage them.
• Another idea is experimenting with tools for communicating with and engaging with youth and adult DJs — we communicate via facebook and email already
• Lucia says, “I’d love to hear other ideas also.”

Q: Do you have computers on site for youth to use if they wanted to create their own marketing materials?
A: We have two laptops that are roaming and a multimedia lab, which often is free.

Q: How are you funded?
A: Through grants mostly. We get grants for collaboration with schools in East Boston. This could be something to look at if people were interested in it.

Community Radio in the US getting access to licenses has been a long drawn-out battle, the current expansion of LPFM licenses is a unique opportunity.

Q: With the design-build project, would we be meeting with the youth?
A: For this semester, Zumix meets monthly with the DJs and that could be increased if the group was interested in working on the design.

Q: Where did the idea for the storybooth come from? Is there support for it from the DJ community?
A: We think there could be interest, but we haven’t actually talked to DJs about it.

This is the second time I’ve TA’d this class. The following are some observations from the courses in 2012 and 2013 and how these are helping us to reflect and iterate on the structure of the course and how these iterations played out in the most recent term. In Spring 2012, Sasha Costanza Chock was instructor. You can see the 2012 syllabus here: http://brownbag.me:9001/p/codesignstudio. In that class, students worked individually and in small groups with community partners to collaboratively design media and communication projects and the syllabus was a mix of theoretical grounding at the intersection of collaborative design and social justice and hands-on codesign: http://codesign.mit.edu/projects/. Most class meetings were split between discussion of readings to provide theoretical and historical context and hands-on activities facilitated by project groups. In Spring 2013, with Federico Casalegno as the lead instructor and Denise Cheng and myself as TAs, the class worked in 2 groups. In early classes, the class developed an understanding of codesign through investigating existing work and becoming familiar with their partners’ work. This semester, our partners joined us during class meetings and for most of the semester, class meetings began with group updates and were followed by separate group work. You can see the syllabus here: http://bit.ly/codesignstudio2013.

Some of the changes to the structure of the course were made in response to observations about the 2012 course. The goal in making these changes was to create container in which students and partners were able to practice design together and to focus on the projects more than the project development.

Observation: Building partnerships and to specifying projects takes time
Adjustment: Create project partnerships and identify problems in advance of the beginning of the term

In 2012 students were responsible for forming a partnership with a community partner and identifying a problem or project to work on together. These steps took more time for some groups which meant less time for experimenting and implementing. In order to remove these initial steps so that groups could begin the course instead with developing their working relationships and designing and iterating, we initiated the partnerships and identified problems together before the start of the class.

In December and January, I spoke with a number of potential partners for the course. At the start of the term, we had 3 partners prepared to join the class and I had spoken to an additional two. One of our partners, a student organizing group, was unable to join as we began the term because the people who would have joined our class had classes of their own at the same time.

Of the potential partners I spoke with with whom we did not partner for the class, joining the meeting time weekly was a limitation. Some of these groups are volunteer committees and both making the time to join the class and agreeing on a problem of high priority to address through the class were challenges.

Even with partnerships and problem definitions in place, groups evolve as the term continues developing intragroup working relationships and clarifying project aims as they iterate.

Observation: Class time was separate from group working time, creating separation between conceptual learning and practice
Adjustment: To create one shared space for the processes of learning and practicing codesign, we invited partners to join the class during class time

Feedback at the end of the term from partners was that this format allowed for weekly meeting times that were productive, but that the time commitment was challenging some weeks. It also meant that the groups had enough time to communicate and work together.

Each group included 2 individuals from the partner organizations and as the term continued, the individuals alternated attending class so there was one member present for each class meeting. This seemed to work fine and split the time between 2 people.

Holding the class meetings as a space for both enrolled students and partners did create formal space for inclusion of additional voices in decision making. After the midterm, both groups met with more members of their partner groups. From the midterm discussion, it was clear to the CCTV group that the journalists were a key part of increasing the visibility of the NeighborMedia program. The CCTV group met with NeighborMedia journalists continuously for the remainder of the course. The DS4SI group included the 2 directors of DS4SI in the class immediately following the midterm review and had a clarifying discussion, confirming some design choices and laying out open needs and questions.

One element lost from engaging during class meeting times with project teams was that teams were not explicitly required to meet together in one another’s spaces. In future courses, we should suggest or require that groups work early and throughout the course in the partners’ spaces some weeks and in the campus meeting space other weeks. This will help the group to ground their suggestions and plans in understanding of the partner’s operating environment.

Observation: Concluding projects is difficult
Adjustment: We identified problems and projects with a clear end date, designed for a specific event

In the 2012 class and in our work at the Center more broadly, defining an end-point for an engagement can be difficult. If the work we are doing requires maintenance over time or ongoing administration and management — who will do that work? If the work we are doing together is iterating on existing services and campaigns, how do you decide when the final iteration is? To help ease defining the how the engagements for the 2013 class would end, projects, we defined this with our partners before the class began.

Reflecting on the popularity of hackathons, day to weeklong design and development sessions, we thought about designing the course as a critique of hackathons with a focus on collaboratiavely creating an inclusive design event. In the end, our projects were developed for a specific event, but were not framed as hackathons.

We addressed this when we developed problem statements with our partners. With CCTV, our problem was how to increase the visibility of the NeighborMedia program in time for the 5 year Anniversary event; with DS4SI, our problem was how to make planning processes public as a component of the Making Planning Processes Public event.

New observations from this term
Our midterm review period was a moment that catalyzed collaboration in new ways because it required the groups to share proposed designs and to reflect on how their designs and aligned with the needs and interests of the partners. As a result, both groups met the following week with additional people from their partner organizations to have conversations that generated ideas more consistent with their partners’ needs and vision. I think we can actively create this kind of catalytic moment earlier in the semester by doing early sketch reviews or perhaps just by making this review earlier in the term.

Both teams were very multidisciplinary and the resulting work was an expression of their myriad skills and talents. This class has drawn students from MIT and elsewhere who are developing skills in wide ranging fields. This has led to rich projects in both semesters and is something we should continue to welcome.

Enroll in the Fall 2013 Codesign Course!

We’ll hold this class again in the Fall 2013 semester listed as CMS.362/.862, Tues 7-10pm E15-363. Sasha Costanza Chock will again be the Instructor for the course and I’ll TA. We’ll be working on the design of the course this summer. Please consider signing up or getting in touch if you’re interested!

Our goals are:

• to work collaboratively to understand real-world civic media work and problems;
• to think critically about the hackathon as a space for inclusive design and development;
• to design and implement an alternative pop-up event informed by both our collaboration and our critique.

Our partners are Clodagh Drummey and Susan Fleischmann with Cambridge Community Television (CCTV) and Corina McCarthy-Fadel, Diego Perez Lacera with Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI). I have had the opportunity to work with CCTV throughout this last year, and it’s great to be working with them in the classroom context as well. DS4SI is a new ally and partner and the more familiar I become with their work, the more I realize we share in common. Our class includes students from MIT, BU, Emerson, Harvard-Kennedy and Wellesley. This semester, Federico Casalegno is instructing the studio and I am TAing together with Denise Cheng.

Both organizations introduced their work to the studio:
CCTV in their own words
DS4SI in their own words

Below are the problem statements excerpted from these introductions:
CCTV excerpt:
CCTV is a nationally recognized community media center that is the voice and vision of all Cambridge residents, businesses and organizations. CCTV provides tools and training to foster free speech and creative expression, and empowers producers and viewers to engage in local issues through media that is informative, engaging and as diverse as the community it serves.

What is a critical issue or problem that you have that we’ll explore in this class?
Citizen Journalism: CCTV has a robust citizen journalism program – neighbormedia.org. The goal is to make this resource THE go-to place for Cambridge news and information. Issues: scaling the program up, promotion! We are planning a high profile half day or day long workshop on issues in citizen journalism: citizen journalism as social justice, legal, resources & tools, etc. We hope to collaborate with the Berkman Center and the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard, and the Center for Civic Media and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.

DS4SI excerpt:
To briefly describe the project, we will be leading ds4si’s “Making Planning Processes Public in Upham’s Corner” project. This project is focused on researching past, present and outside planning processes relevant to the Upham’s Corner area. We will also be commissioning artists to create an interactive pop-up shop exhibit that highlights the different planning processes and planners pertinent to the area.

What is a critical issue or problem that you have that we’ll explore in this class?
How to most effectively present the information we want to highlight in regards to planning processes in Uphams Corners, in a way that is immediately accessible, impactful, and interactive for the public, while using the most suitable technology available. Some current ideas include memory mapping and gentrification mapping and interactive public signage.

CCTV Partners: Susan Fleischmann, Clodagh Drummey
http://www.cctvcambridge.org/

Mission
CCTV is a nationally recognized community media center that is the voice and vision of all Cambridge residents, businesses and organizations. CCTV provides tools and training to foster free speech and creative expression, and empowers producers and viewers to engage in local issues through media that is informative, engaging and as diverse as the community it serves.

History and Major Programs
Since opening our doors in 1988, CCTV has been named number one in the country an unprecedented 10 times by the national Alliance for Community Media. CCTV is home to:
• Three local cable channels featuring programming produced by Cambridge residents, arts and cultural organizations and City agencies
• A dynamic, media-rich website, including the Cambridge Media Map
(cctvcambridge.org/mediamap) and the Cambridge Calendar (cambridgecalendar.org)
• Hands-on media production and technology workshops, providing access to emerging technologies and state-of-the-art media equipment
• NeighborMedia: an innovative citizen journalism program offering coverage of local issues and events (neighbormedia.org)
•the Cambridge Savings Bank and Google Computer Labs: hosting classes and public drop in hours for those without access to computers and the internet
• Special outreach programs for seniors, immigrants low-income communities and non-profits
• The Youth Media Program: a vibrant media arts and work experience program for underserved teens (cctvcambridge.org/youth)

What are your assets — within the organization, what are your best skills, who are your partners in the community?

In the shadow of the Boston media market, Cambridge, a city of over 100,000 residents, is not served by a daily newspaper, or by any commercial TV or radio stations. As a result, CCTV’s channels and website serve a critical role as a primary source of local information, a showcase for arts and culture and a forum for civic engagement. CCTV’s community channels reach over 35,000 homes in Cambridge that subscribe to cable television. Our website has a worldwide audience.

More than just a TV station, CCTV is a community media center where Cambridge residents and organizations create and share media about themselves and their community. After completing an extensive curriculum of media art and technology workshops, CCTV members produce thousands of hours of programming each year. Reflective of the city’s diversity, our members are predominantly lower income and vary in age and ethnicity.

CCTV also provides services to local non-profit organizations, documenting community events, hosting in studio discussions about social service programs, and producing Public Service Announcements.  CCTV’s efforts provided these organizations their only electronic link into the homes of their constituents.

Share some success stories: What do you do, what have you done and what are some current stories.
This year CCTV turns 25.  Something that was just an idea in 1988 has grown into a thriving media center that is recognized as the best of its kind in the country.   Over the years, CCTV has become a national model for utilizing new technologies to build community.

In 2011, to further expand our programs and services and better respond to the needs of the Cambridge community, CCTV relocated to a larger facility in Central Square.  CCTV’s new home is the place in our city where the best of community meets the latest in technology; an incubator where residents and organizations are at the controls, utilizing cutting edge media and technology to strengthen the fabric of our city.

In 2012, more than 650 individuals, organizations and businesses utilized CCTV’s services in our new facility.

We launched a collaboration with Google called Age Engage which engaged 65 seniors in one-to-one Internet training. Mary, a participant, explained,  “I like the one-to-one approach of the program for meeting me at my skill level and dealing with specific issues. It is the most useful adult education I’ve ever had.”

The Youth Media Program served more teens than ever– a diverse group of 45 young people.  One teen spoke of the program:  “The Youth Media Program is a good program because it teaches youth in Cambridge how to use media to express your feelings, and to get a point across that you want people to know about.”

We also provided more than 75 non-profit organizations technology training and production services. In 2013, we launched the Non-Profit Resource Center, which will offer more, specialized training and production serves geared to meet the needs of community organizations.

What is a critical issue or problem that you have that we’ll explore in this class?

Citizen Journalism: CCTV has a robust citizen journalism program – neighbormedia.org. The goal is to make this resource THE go-to place for Cambridge news and information. Issues: scaling the program up, promotion! We are planning a high profile half day or day long workshop on issues in citizen journalism: citizen journalism as social justice, legal, resources & tools, etc. We hope to collaborate with the Berkman Center and the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard, and the Center for Civic Media and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.

from: http://ds4si.org/mobile-rd-labs/

DS4SI Partners: Corina McCarthy-Fadel, Diego Perez Lacera
Project:  Making Planning Processes Public in Upham’s Corner
http://ds4si.org/

Description of the organization
Design Studio for Social Intervention, ds4si, is an artistic research and development outfit for the improvement of civil society and everyday life. We are situated at the intersections of design thinking and practice, social justice and activism, public art and social practice and civic / popular engagement. We design and test social interventions with and on behalf of marginalized populations, controversies and ways of life. For us, social interventions are actions taken to reconfigure social habits, unspoken agreements or arrangements that, prior to the intervention, add to the durability and normalcy of a social problem. We focus on social interventions because we believe they can affect both formal hierarchical systems like school systems and complex nonlinear systems like cultures.

To briefly describe the project, we will be leading ds4si’s “Making Planning Processes Public in Upham’s Corner” project. This project is focused on researching past, present and outside planning processes relevant to the Upham’s Corner area. We will also be commissioning artists to create an interactive pop-up shop exhibit that highlights the different planning processes and planners pertinent to the area.

What are your assets — within the organization, what are your best skills, who are your partners in the community?

Some of our assets within the organization include our methodology, which allows for creative and experimental ways to tackle social problems without relying on or ignoring existing methods. Our space is a place of convergence for artists, activists, academics, and organizers to think and create collectively. One of our strongest skills is that, when tackling new problems we do so in a non-linear fashion, which pushes us to examine the multiplicity of factors that may affect a situation. Our partners include the following: The City School, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Uphams Corner Main Street, The Food Project, ArtPlace, Boston Youth Organizing Project, Gallery Basquiat, Etc. For further information please visit http://ds4si.org/storage/ds4si_whatwedo.pdf

Share some success stories: What do you do, what have you done and what are some current stories ? Past successes include:

THE PUBLIC KITCHEN
http://ds4si.org/public-kitchen/
The Public Kitchen is a creative R & D project aimed at problematizing the current degradation (and subsequent privatization) of all things public—schools, parks, water,
hospitals, etc. Going in the opposite direction, the Public Kitchen will raise awareness of how making things public can increase access to affordable healthy foods and vibrant social communities. For activists taking on food justice issues, it also provides both a demonstration of a unique intervention and valuable data about what people desire in food and sociality.

FLIP IT
http://ds4si.org/lets-flip-it
When Boston youth organizers wanted help taking on the social violence that was sweeping their communities and causing a spike in youth murders, we worked with them to design the “Let’s Flip It” campaign. Based on a deep exploration of the Five S’s, LFI took the symbol of the fitted cap (used by many youth to rep their blocks and therefore the cause of much friction between gangs and crews), and created a youth-to-youth campaign using a blank white fitted.
Combined with logo pins and flyers, LFI aimed to address the problem at the scale of the city, creating a direct way for youth to communicate with each other that it was time to “flip Boston”, to stop repping their blocks and start repping living.

What is a critical issue or problem that you have that we’ll explore in this class?

How to most effectively present the information we want to highlight in regards to planning processes in Uphams Corners, in a way that is immediately accessible, impactful, and interactive for the public, while using the most suitable technology available. Some current ideas include memory mapping and gentrification mapping and interactive public signage.