James Vorderbruggen and Edward Burnell

Through a year of co-learning, Ujima and Mass Mesh will organize a community-owned wireless mesh network in Roxbury and Dorchester to provide home broadband access.

inPUBLIC is a festival to reclaim public spaces throughout Boston.

inPUBLIC is a 3-day festival in September that will take across public sites in Upham’s Corner and downtown Boston. The purpose of this festival is to activate spaces for public-making – where familiar and unfamiliar people can come together to engage with familiar and unfamiliar activities. Through forms of verbal discourse, such as panels and discussions, as well as other forms of discourse, such as art-making, play, and food, we hope to spark new ideas, conversations about difficult issues, and a stronger sense of a right to the city and its public-in-theory spaces.

Planning a  multi-site, multi-day festival requires a lot of thinking on spatial, temporal, and material factors. Within each site, the festival also requires thinking on how the energies of different activities and visual pieces will intersect — what kind of atmosphere will the festival create at different points in time? Given that many factors can change throughout the stages of planning this festival, we wanted to create something that could be used modularly throughout the planning process. As a result, we created a Festival Planning Toolkit that addresses 3 aspects of the planning process: figuring out the spatial layout of the activities at each site, creating a timeline for when different activities will take place, and understanding the logistical needs and impact of each activity.

Final Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FuvxVbgo-UOglYyyxz7CCUql2bVJFeXJrGN1UL9xfhI/edit?usp=sharing

Case Study: https://docs.google.com/document/d/182eItN75U8bk8lxks7opleBHE37tfM__-oM2vNrSx44/edit?usp=sharing

Below is the Google Slides presentation for this project, and a condensed version of the design case study. You can view the full case study online as well.

The Hacking the Archives project is an ongoing collaboration between MIT students, MIT faculty, and several community partner organizations. Its aim is twofold. The first goal is to co-design a hackathon bringing these organizations together with each other, with archivists, with MIT affiliates, and with local youths and community members. This hackathon took place in May 2019. The second goal, currently in progress, is to continue several of those projects over the summer in engagement with local youth. This paper represents a case study from the perspective of two co-designers, Annie Wang and Ben Silverman, reflecting on the background and process of putting together the Hacking the Archives hackathon, primarily through their collaboration with the community organization METCO, Inc.

Link to case study: Here

Link to slide deck: Here