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.
Dance Court Design Team, Marry Hannon Park, Dorchester, MA 2025