Youth 2 Youth Action Shots...

Our first ever Youth 2 Youth Action Summit was a big success this past weekend. The exhibits highlighted work the Design Studio has done with teens around youth violence over the last 4 summers. Close to 100 participants dug in for interactive activities, Let's Flip It button-making and t-shirt design, mini-discussions and more. Thanks to all who came out, and we look forward to continuing to build on the momentum. And many thanks to our alumni and volunteer facilitators, as well as our curator, Kelly Sherman.

In the top photo Youth Activism Design Studio alum Olmis Sanchez talks about how they designed and played Big Urban Games in communities that were seen as dangerous and negative. In the above photo, she gets a group out to play!

The interactive exhibit is still open for youth groups by appointment. Please contact lori [at] ds4si [dot] org. We'd love to have you! A video of the 3-day event will be posted in the coming weeks as well... Finally, more Let's Flip It pins, stickers and flyers are available too.

School Lab Interns Hack Diagrams

A few weeks back our School Lab User Researchers were visited by an old Studio friend, artist Judith Leemann. As a professor at Mass Art, she'd found that her students were better able to talk about their art-making process if they didn't actually have to talk about it. Rather she offered them a unique variety of diagrams and invited them to "hack into" them to use them to describe their work. Hearing about their success, we decided to do the same with our School Lab project. Judie came in and invited our interns to hack into some unusual diagrams and use them to describe the physical, social and temporal elements of their school hallways. Below is some of their work!

Like Judith's Mass Art students, our interns found that this strange task helped them get at some of their views of hallway life in a new way, from the challenges of hallway flow (and their tendency to blame the students in their way vs. the hallway as a flawed system) to the sturdiness of social life and romance as part of every 5 minute class-switchover!

Thanks Judith!

Youth 2 Youth Action Summit

 

The Summit will include an "interactive idea tour" that highlights past
work we've done with youth to address violence, including Let's Flip It,
Big Urban Games and the Grill Project, as well as chances for youth to
jump in, share and test their own ideas, create buttons and t-shirts,
design their own big urban games, and more. In addition, Friday night's
reception is dedicated to thinking with adult allies about how we can
support youth strategies to stop violence.

We are hoping to have youth (and youth workers) from all over, so they can
see and hear from each other what is going on in different areas and what
approaches might work well across geographies.

Terry Marshall on The Million Hoodie March in Union Sq. NYC

By now many people have heard the details of the tragic murder of Trayvon Martin by a self-styled neighborhood vigilante. What’s less clear seems to be the organizing that has come about in an attempt to bring Trayvon’s murderer to justice. Trayvon’s parents setup a petition on Change.org to bring awareness to the situation. The petition gained steam on the Internet and has reached over 500,000 signatures. The NAACP and other traditional Black organizations have shown support for the parents but they are not the reason why thousands of mostly young people showed up at Union sq.

Enter bloggers Amy Frame, Sharon Veloso Panelo and Social Media Strategist Daniel Maree. Using Facebook, YouTube and Storify they put out the call for a Million Hoodies March. They wanted the petition to reach 1 million signatures so they asked everyone to wear a hoodie on March 21 and March and to take a picture of themselves in a hoodie in order to create an image of a different America. The Hoodie being the “thing” that represents not just Trayvon’s but all Black men’s “dangerousness”. The Hoodie embodies the story of Trayvon and others who have been targeted by societies mainstream. In effect the Hoodie becomes the symbol and the thing.

This ignited the imaginations of many young people of color who all came out in the streets yesterday. Occupy wall St., Occupy The Hood and city council people Jumaane Williams and Ydanis Rodrigez showed some leadership during the march but there is no doubt that the unaffiliated youth, primarily black bought the fire. When the march began it took the whole street and was able to shutdown traffic. Black college youth shouted chants of “We are Trayvon Martin” and “Don’t Shoot me, don’t hurt me, for skittles and ice tea” as the march wound the street of lower Manhattan. More than one veteran organizer that I marched with turned to me and repeated, “This is beautiful…this is beautiful”. People were angry but alive. Expressing their anger, taking space, making their voices heard and being bold. The march circled back around to Union Sq. Park but two breakaway marches went to one police plaza and Times sq. There didn’t seem to be a target (although on the Facebook page it said the march would go to the United Nations) but that seems to be a recurring theme in a number of the recent street protest. Partly due to a lack of experience of young organizers but also it seems to be a response to the growing tentacle of Capital that has seeped into every aspect of our daily lives. The idea being since capital is everywhere the goal is to just “disrupt”. Stop the system’s flows through the disruption of space.

At the end of the night there seemed to be a sense of accomplishment. My one worry is that the two recent outpourings of protests that have come from Black youth have been in repose to Black death (Troy Davis being the first). Anger at Black Death will only sustain for so long. In order to keep this new energy going black youth are going to need Hope and Vision of a new world where they live and thrive instead of dying for ice tea and skittles.

Aaron Levy, Director and Curator of Slought Foundation to talk at DS4SI

Aaron Levy is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Slought (http://slought.org), a small Philadelphia-based institution whose programs focus as much on histories of cultural experimentation and political advocacy as on the creation of social practices. Levy has developed an approach to the curatorial which mobilizes historical models, and which imagines small organizations as agencies that produce correspondences, relationships, and practices of engagement.

Mixplace:

A Future History

Thursday, April 5, 7 p.m. Design Studio for Social Intervention 1946 Washington Street, 2nd floor, Boston Free and open to the public

This talk will take the form of a casual workshop/conversation around the process of developing Mixplace, a collaborative project that provides an alternative education model in order to address the crisis in community participation and political representation.

The project aspires to enable conversations between individuals and institutions within West Philadelphia to circulate different ways of thinking and making, linking the specialized knowledge of institutions with the everyday knowledge of communities. Slought, People's Emergency Center, and PennDesign are the primary Philadelphia institutions who are coming together to form this alternative educational model. The primary collaborators will be neighborhood youth and university students, who will interact with a diverse faculty of of curators, community activists, artists, architects and researchers. The project is being developed in dialogue with Teddy Cruz at the Center for Urban Ecologies at the University of California, San Diego.