WELCOME TO THE DESIGN GYM
DS4SI has opened the first-ever Design Gym to engage people in worldbuilding that begins at the scale of their neighborhood.
What would you like to design or re-imagine in your neighborhood?
ABOUT THE DESIGN GYM
Imagine...
What if there was a Design Gym in your area, a place where you could go to work out your ideas, to consider the design of your neighborhood, city, and public life? Where you are welcomed to learn everything from Civic Design to woodworking, from participatory action research to videography? Where it smells like the homemade chili and sounds like the rhythmic hum of a busy sewing class.
The Design Gym creates the conditions for BIPOC neighbors, artists, youth, organizers, merchants, and more, to imagine the physical, social, and aesthetic arrangements of their lives.
How does the Design Gym work?
The Design Gym is a new community infrastructure, a mashup, a place to work out new ideas, stretch the muscles of imagination, meet neighborhood artists and organizers, imagine and prototype new solutions, learn design techniques, and collectively rebuild our communities to be more just and vibrant.
It is a new civic space created by the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI), which is committed to social & aesthetic justice. We are located in the Upham’s Corner neighborhood of Boston.
For more information about the Design Gym, or if you have something you would like to learn or share here, please contact us at designgym@ds4si.org.
What new infrastructure will you imagine with your community?
We believe now is the time to engage BIPOC communities as the co-designers of new community infrastructures, ones that are deeply rooted in their sense and sensibility of place, aesthetics, and relation. Building on what we’ve learned from fifteen years of co-imagining such vibrant community infrastructures as the Public Kitchen, Dance Court, SERC and inPUBLIC, and now the DS4SI Design Gym.
Support our work.
Click here to contribute to DS4SI’s initiatives.
We would like to deeply thank our friends and sponsors for making the Design Gym free and open to all: Barr Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Luce Foundation, Surdna Foundation, and Radical Imagination for Racial Justice (via the partnership with MassArt Foundation and the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture) and the City of Boston Cultural Investment Grant.
If you would like to support the Design Gym, please consider making a donation.
Thank You!