Blog

Youth 2 Youth Action Shots...

2012-04-26T22:31:39Z

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

2012-04-24T17:21:52Z

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

2012-04-10T16:16:16Z

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

2012-03-22T20:31:06Z

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

2012-03-22T18:16:41Z

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.

DS4SI's School Lab Youth User-Research Begins

2012-03-22T17:22:40Z

School Lab is a design research project and an interactive installation.

It investigates ways everyday school objects, rituals and settings shape students’ experience of school. We want our youth-led research to:

surface less explored ways of thinking about what makes school “school” for students
function as a fresh way to speculate about school change and improvement
support the capacity of students and youth organizers to imagine the kinds of schools they want, even as they engage in struggles to keep the schools they need

Last week we hired 8 fabulous youth interns from the Boston Public Schools to do our user-research with us. To get a sense of what we were talking about, we invited them to think about the chairs in their schools and sketch some ideas of what could make them better. Ideas included ways chairs could be more comfortable, work better for holding backpacks, help keep students awake and even help keep students comfortable in the hot and cold temperatures of some of our old school buildings. Here are a couple examples..

Next up..sketches and observations from school hallways... Stay tuned!

1 Million Hoodie March for Trayvon

2012-03-21T15:54:56Z

Columbine in Afghanistan and Sanford

2012-03-21T14:15:12Z

After the Columbine killings in 1999, sociologists, psychologists, educators and all sorts of public safety experts had the chance to unpack what had happened. Much of their work focused on what had turned Eric Harris and Dylon Klebold into killers, and how schools could work to prevent another massacre. The results included recommendations for ways to spot potential killers amongst alienated youth and new policies like metal detectors at schools. In other words, preventions based on an individualized perspective of "what went wrong".

Now we see the same thing with U.S. Army Sargeant Robert Bales, who is charged with going on a rampage on March 11 and killing 17 Afghani villagers, including sleeping women and children. Experts are combing his background and considering PTSD, multiple deployments and possible marital stress. Again, with this frame the solutions are likely to be those that might help the military identify possible shooters before they rampage.

Ditto the treatment given to George Zimmerman after his shooting of unarmed Trayvon Martin in Sanford, FL. Conversations are already surfacing about what drove him as an individual to make his decision to shoot. Was it the alleged rash of break-ins in his gated community? Was it his desire to be a vigilante? His prior record?

If we continue to look at murder as an individual crime, we will continue to come up with individualized solutions. And we'll never keep up. None of these conversations look at the much larger social settings that the murders spring from: at how our country has normalized war and killing, how black and brown bodies around the world are expendable, and how young people bear the brunt of both of these dynamics.

We must do better. We have to see the will to kill not as a sign of individual mental illness or even personal racism, but as an American epidemic, and one that won't be cured one flu shot or gun shot at a time. That's why we talk about SOCIAL interventions at the Design Studio. This one needs a doozy.

Youth 2 Youth Action Summit @ Studio

2012-03-21T13:47:11Z

We hope you can come and please help spread the word! Even if you do not work directly with youth or directly on violence, it is an opportunity to see how the Design Studio's Youth Activism Design Institute has taken on violence in some unique and broadly applicable ways.

Also, if you are interested in contributing to the Summit, we are still looking for partners to lead DIY arts activities, and we're open to other ideas as well!

Gestures for Civil Society: Keystone XL Case

2012-03-15T16:57:17Z

What's Keystone XL? Aside from the actual pipeline, we think the political process involved in this fight exposes challenges the the design of our civil society.

Design Problem: Senate's attempt and capacity to force a decision of the magnitude of Keystone XL through within a 24 hour time period.

Implications of Design Problem: That it was possible that such a major decision could happen within a 24 hour window means that there is an asumption that the public doesn't need to weigh in on it.

Design Opportunity: The chance to imagine new forms and opportunities for the public to be in dialogue with their elected officials.

Action: Send quick sketches of systems, processes, scenarios or ways to use current media tools that have been more inclusive, deliberative, commensurate and democratic to your Senator and to us.

action@ds4si.org

Design Extra Credit: Take a picture of you with your Senator (or someone on their staff) along with your design solution.