Hi all! I’m Daphne. I’m a first-year Master in City Planning (MCP) student at MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. I have experience in community development and ethnographic research in Chinese and Chinese-American contexts. I’m back in school to develop a practice premised on a more holistic understanding of place. I’d like to learn tools in design, policy, media, and art to interrogate and influence people’s connection with place, sense of belonging, and agency.

Previously, I worked with a team of designers in Beijing, China to transform air defense basements into shared community spaces in residential neighborhoods. As the ethnographer on the team, I led a participatory design process with local community members. Here is a video of an event we organized. In this class, I look forward to building a network of co-designers and connecting our practice across contexts. I’m excited to be in a space fully dedicated to experiencing the nuances of realizing the principles of Design Justice.

I believe the co-design process is cyclical and reiterative. Its messiness comes from curiosity (‘what if we thought about this another way’), chance (experimentation through error), and changing contexts (‘we don’t need this anymore’), but ultimately, the many steps in the process create roots that sprout! In this class, I’d like to be rooted in real contexts and authentic relationships, and to deepen my involvement in Boston. I hope that with the collective creativity and energy of our class and community partners, we’ll have mini-sprouts of interesting and smart but grounded ideas that help tackle issues of inequity and injustice ingrained in our society today.