Rehearsing a new everyday life.
“If we want alternative futures, we have to rehearse alternative presents.”
In this political moment, as the elite are enacting their visions for our collective future, imagination is a critical tool for global society to build new worlds.
At Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI), we intervene in the arrangements of civil society and everyday life by partnering with communities, artists, and social justice practitioners to conceptualize, design, and collectively rehearse and rebuild the worlds we want to see.
We believe that another
everyday life is possible.
For 20 years, DS4SI has been co-imagining new community infrastructures that center aesthetic justice. From our embodied design practices like Public Kitchen,Dance Court,Design Gym,inPUBLIC and Social Emergency Response Centers (SERCs), to our Ideas—Arrangements—Effects framework, we’ve been laying the groundwork for engaging BIPOC communities in co-creating an ecology of new arrangements that can change social life.”
Situated at the intersections of design thinking and practice, social justice and activism, public art and social practice and civic / popular engagement, we design and test social interventions with and on behalf of marginalized populations, controversies and ways of life.
Our Work
Our writing explores the intersections of social justice, public space, culture, design, and civic imagination, offering reflections and frameworks for building more just, vibrant, and relational ways of being.
Our Writing
Prototype Lab
The Prototype Lab is a ds4si testing space dedicated to the practice of experimenting with new ways of being together in public life.
Design Gym
The Design Gym is a community infrastructure to work out new ideas and solutions & collectively rebuild our communities to be more just and vibrant.
Interventions
We design social interventions that engage populations in imagining and designing new solutions to social problems, new futures and new worlds.
In a moment shaped by fear, urgency, and attempts to instill division, we believe our power grows when we join together in collective action.
By making visible traces of our courage in public, through acts both massive and mundane, we connect with our commitment to move forward in solidarity.
Momentum Lab is a DS4SI project that brings neighbors, organizers, artists, youth, and community groups into a shared space to co-design ways of meeting this moment. Through collective making: posters, zines, stencils, buttons, performance, storytelling, and more, we generate daily proof of life, solidarity, resistance, and imagination.
Momentum Lab is open every Wednesday and Thursday at 6pm at Prototype Lab, 545 Columbia Road, Dorchester.
Check out the Design Gym Spring 2026 Kickoff: Meeting the Moment in Dorchester, MA, on April 8, 2026.
Check out this conversation, titled “Who Is the State For? Beyond the Duopoly,” is a thought-provoking and engaging discussion featuring Steph Guilloud of Project South and organizer and activist Rachel Herzing, moderated by DS4SI's co-founder Kenneth Bailey. It was held over Zoom and live-streamed from the Momentum Lab in Dorchester, MA, on February 16, 2026.
UPCOMING EVENTS
UPCOMING EVENTS
SPRING 2026
SEMESTER CALENDAR
Momentum Lab happens every Wednesday & Thursday this spring!
Where? Prototype Lab 545 Columbia Rd Dorchester, MA
Dance Court Design Team, Marry Hannon Park, Dorchester, MA 2025