Reflecting on the nature of codesigning and the need to recognize everyone in the process — not just the people whose voices are the loudest.
Name: Anna Chung
Affiliations: 1st year master’s student @ Comparative Media Studies, research assistant @ Civic Media
Interests: civic engagement, participatory mapping, housing justice, gentrification, social media design
Skills: data visualization, visual design, UX design, 360 video, 3D printing
I’d love to develop a sustained involvement with local organizing efforts around issues of civic engagement and gentrification. In the past, I’ve done mentoring and community organizing work with the Asian American Mentoring Program. I’ve also volunteered as a developer with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project to create a map showing the relationship between art galleries and gentrification in Los Angeles.
In the Boston area, two potential partner organizations are the Asian American Resource Workshop (focusing on civic engagement with API communities) and City Life / Vida Urbana (focusing on housing justice). I am not currently involved with either organization but know people who have worked with them.
However, I am also totally open to working with other organizations that other students may have more established relationships with. My hope is to be as helpful as possible, and I realize that building a new relationship with an organization can take a lot of time and resources. I’m looking forward to learn about codesign/design justice and to incorporate these principles into the work I do beyond this course as well.
I’m delighted to be working next to y’all in this codesign studio. 🙂 Rather than starting with a bio, I’m going to try leaping straight into the work I hope to do, tagging in my background as it comes up. (we’ll see if that works into something readable lol)
I’m intrigued by the formation of shared ideas (aka joint-cognitive design concepts) during creative group work. For example: imagine a group of people discussing something they’ve agreed to work on together: it starts out as just a name or label, but as they come together they build it up by talking about their perspectives on what it should be. Then a fascinating thing happens: someone at the table asks another person “what do you think [a particular part of the concept] looks like?” At this point the asker is referencing a shared idea, something that isn’t physically real (though it may be referenced in sketches), but that the asker can imagine, and what’s more knows the person they’re asking the question of can imagine, and further, that that person can see things in this shared reality that the asker cannot.
This kind of conversation has happened in many of the engineering, product design, and teaching teams I’ve been a part of, and it generally isn’t remarked upon. But in my experience it’s during this formation of the shared idea where many of the voices, perspectives, and concerns that are marginalized or less powerful are prevented from shaping the direction of a project. The shared idea, especially as anchored in sketches, CAD, spreadsheets, can serve as a secret language, excluding those who were not given the chance to build bridges from their experience to the shared idea from having a hand in the project’s vision and organization of work. For me, a powerful realization of this came while teaching in Ghana, where when we presented hands-on activities students held back on telling relations between chemistry (which they’d learned in English) and everyday life (in a city that spoke Fanti) until the classroom became a comfortable place for them to switch between the two languages.
My hope for this class is to focus on co-creating those moments and representations of shared ideas in ways that build power at and amplify voices along the margin of who we consider “designers”. This is currently my research for a Mechanical Engineering PhD, but it started when I was working in the engineering industry: I wanted the machinists to be critiquing the modelers’ concepts just as much as the modelers were currently critiquing the machinists’. However, the aerospace research engineering that I started with began to feel a bit too privileged to hold some of my hopes for co-design. As my expertise is in interviewing practitioners about the shared ideas of their work (which are by their nature difficult to put into words) my hope is to work with a community of practitioners to build power and knowledge such that their shared ideas are more listened to and given more weight in the rooms they bring them to.
In particular, I’d love to work with a local union and unionized workers. I have a few connections to labor organizers in this area, and am beginning to reach out, but am also definitely feeling my inexperience in co-design as I try to understand how to do so and what the opportunities might be! From my current perspective, the way organizers reflect on, share, and build their practices seem like a very interesting set of shared ideas to work with. I’m quite open though to other suggestions of communities and partners. 😀
I’m Samuel R. Mendez, and everyone outside of my family usually just calls me Sam. I’m an artist and researcher from Chicago.
In this semester’s codesign studio, I mainly hope to support ongoing work in the Boston area around some aspect of social equity. My focus in my academic work is usually some aspect of health equity. It’ll be interesting to see how this focus can bring something useful to the table for an organization working on a topic that might not seem directly related at first glance. I’m super excited to learn from people who have been focusing on a different set of social issues than I’ve been.
On the production side of this class, I have skills in animation, video, and basic front-end web development. I’m constantly exploring new methods of expressing ideas and bringing people together to discuss them. Most recently that’s included performing and writing short stage pieces. I enjoy the surprises that pop up when I’m helping to figure out what methods are best suited to realize a certain idea and accomplish engagement goals. In this codesign studio, I’m looking forward to the process of exploration and finding the right methods to help a community organization further its goals through a specific project.
An abstract representation of the collaborative design process: a triangle surrounded by squiggly lines on each side and thick, short curved lines on each point. Three thinner, shorter curved lines surround the squiggly-line shape in an outer layer.
I think the codesign process should be something that invites codesigners to flip on its head, rotate, take apart, and toss around to find the best angle from which to approach their goals. I think it should be a cycle without a very clear starting or ending point, both exciting and challenging in its flexibility. I represented these qualities through my abstract image in our “Name That Tech” exercise.
As such, I don’t yet have a clear idea of what I want to work on in this studio. I hope to find the area where I can best contribute by learning more about some of the projects and groups that classmates have connections to.
Hello, all! My name is Annie and I’m a first-year Masters student in the Comparative Media Studies department. I work in the Education Arcade and focus primarily on edtech, game design, and new media technologies in education. Recently, I’ve become very interested in civic education and the potential of incorporating race and tolerance curricula into classes through the use of new media, such as mixed reality. I don’t have a lot of experience in civics (though I did spend some time as a design intern for WorldTeach in undergrad), so I’m excited to learn more about the field and what I can do to benefit people who truly need the assistance.
I don’t have a specific community partner in mind and would be excited to either join a preexisting project or help someone set up a new project. My background is in art and design – digital art, 3D modeling, UI/graphics, storyboarding, and so on – and I am also relatively well versed in writing and research. In a given project, I often wear many hats.
Although my background is multidisciplinary, my experience is largely limited to academic projects with coders, designers, and scholars. I feel that this semester will provide a great opportunity to make connections with people deeply involved with civic/community initiates and learn more about how to leverage my skills in the relevant practice. Whatever the work is, I’m excited to work with a group of people with diverse skills and get my hands dirty creating something that can have both a direct and positive impact on the local community.
Ideas radiate from our comfort zone when we’re shocked to life.
I’m James, and during the co-design lab, I’m hoping to meaningfully engage communities in the design process of Mass Mesh, a community owned internet initiative that is currently in its infancy. This project is really comprised of the shared effort of a small group of core developers/enthusiasts right now. Work so far has focused on developing a low-cost, high-throughput router that is capable of scaling the network. The developers are disillusioned by market-based approaches to community internet like Althea, and unimpressed by short-cut implementations like the NYC Mesh (See: hub and spoke network.) In order to move beyond these implementations, though, we will need to engage with potential network participants in order to create a better strategy. It would be impossible to build a meaningfully decentralized network of this kind from the top down.
We have not done market research, as far as I know. We have agreed that we should focus on low income communities, but this decision was made based on no data about where that community may be. We have also not verified whether this imagined community would be receptive to operating network hardware in their home. We hypothesize that those without the means to purchase internet access from corporate providers will be the most receptive to alternatives because they have the most to gain.
I personally think that events and targeted advertising would be a good way to get the ball rolling on community engagement. Events could focus on getting hardware up and running, but I don’t think that’s the most effective way to use our time. Hardware setup is basically a fixed process. I think that the question of how to overcome the service provider -> customer relationship on our network is of central importance. Organizing as a co-op makes intuitive sense, but this is vague. Establishing basic by-laws and funding mechanisms will take some conversation. It would be best if we had early adopters to engage in this conversation with. Ideally, these people would know what it means to run a network node, and understand the methods available for connecting our mesh to the broader internet infrastructure at least in general terms. This basic knowledge will help guide the conversations about ownership of network infrastructure.
The problems facing Mass Mesh are multifarious, and we will be up against strong capitalist players in this market. Radical engagement with the community provides a way forward for us without compromising our core mission of bringing internet access into the Commons.
DiscoTech Flyer from the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition
Hello co-designers! I’m pleased to announce that in the Spring of 2019, the co-design studio will be organized as an advanced practicum around the theme of “hacking hackathons,” with a goal of developing shared knowledge and best practices for organizing radically inclusive design events. Projects may be individual or team-based.
General description: The Civic Media Co-design Studio is a service-learning, project-based studio course in collaborative design of civic media. Students partner with community-based organizations to create civic media projects grounded in real-world community needs. The course covers co-design theory and practice, including methods for community participation in iterative stages of project ideation, design, prototyping, testing, launch, and stewardship.
Listing in the MIT Course Catalog: http://student.mit.edu/catalog/mCMSa.html#CMS.862
It’s no secret that there is little to no representation of black and brown individuals in the technology sector. Current curriculums and programs attempting to address this deficiency often seek to show students opportunities or directly try to convince them to pursue STEM careers. One thing these programs have in common is that they often fail to relate to the students.
Fascinate, Inc. is an organization with a mission to bring cutting-edge technology to underrepresented students nationwide and facilitate pathways into STEM-based careers. Cultural relevancy is their strategy of choice in getting students excited about STEM. The project we chose to focus on relates to the Dope Tech Showcase, a technology showcase held in a local makerspace with students and volunteers of color. Our goal is to work collaboratively in determining a process that will make the Dope Tech Showcase cohesive and replicable over an extended period of time. The result would be a showcase guide that the event organizer and/or volunteers could use to smoothly operate their own Dope Tech Showcase.
Within Massachusetts, inequality is rampant. A symptom of and contributor to that inequality is the prohibitive cost of child care which further perpetuates poor families struggling to both raise children and bring in a livable income. Furthermore, structural barriers prevent young women and mothers in poverty especially those of color, to come out of poverty. Project Hope works to alleviate these systemic challenges by providing programs that work with women to overcome these barriers. In order to best assist Project Hope in their mission, we devised a social media campaign to bring in more caregivers, students, families, and participants into their programs.
For this project, I worked with 22 youth at the South Boston Clubhouse to design activities that promote constructionism and technological fluency, to be put in a subscription box and paired with an online community. The hope is to create an empowering and encouraging environment for marginalized youth where they feel free to pursue an education/career in STEM. The activities were selected by the youth, with help from the books The Art of Tinkering and Make: Start Making! Additionally, members of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group contributed activity ideas. The subscription box, while still being developed, was intentionally designed to encourage youth to pursue STEM activities – and ultimately a career, no matter the obstacles. From several of my listening methods, I learned that a majority of the youth I worked with didn’t know anyone in their families (or social network) who have a career in STEM, and didn’t know what types of careers were possible with a STEM education. This information shaped the direction of the online community. The online community’s purpose is to give youth a place to explore and ask questions they don’t have the space and opportunity to in their everyday lives, in addition to showcasing their work.
The race, class, and social barriers to constructionism in education for Black (and other marginalized communities) prevents their access to participation in 21st century careers in STEM fields that have the power to radically improve the economic trajectories of their lives. My hope is that with this project, we can find a way to lessen the barriers, diversify STEM fields, and show youth what is possible while also connecting them to opportunities.
Expanding the Notion of Public Good: A Popular Education WeChat Strategy for Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) Boston
Summary:
We are creating educational content for progressive Chinese American community organizations to distribute on WeChat to broaden their base and to counter right-wing Chinese narratives.
Abstract:
The Chinatown Progressive Association (CPA) organizes working-class Chinese/Chinese Americans in Boston around issues of housing and workers rights. Civic action and political education around economic and racial justice are embedded in their organizing model.
Through discussions over the course of March and April with CPA staff, our co-design project landed on the form of educational content expanding the notion of the public good, and on the issue of right-wing organizing on WeChat, a Chinese social media platform that has been utilized extensively by conservative Chinese activists.
To address misinformation spread by right-wing Chinese Americans, there must be a more diverse range of content available on the WeChat platform. We are designing shareable WeChat content that can open up easily within a group chat and that can be integrated into a subscription account post. This collection of images will also be given to CPA in larger file format so that they can also be used as posters. The first topic we chose was data disaggregation, one of the most contested issues on WeChat currently.
