The Engagement Center is a harm reduction day shelter and the lowest threshold space in the City of Boston — meaning those with nowhere else to go can receive care, services, and shelter.
I was the technical director and creative collaborator for the People’s Late Night, a live, 2.5-hour multicamera talk show we hosted on a street corner on a Friday Night. Whimsy and sweet coolness emerged. Produced by the Design Studio for Social Intervention.
HOSTED BY DZIDZOR AZAGLO + BROTHER DULI
LIVESTREAMED | DJ SET BY DA MEKONNEN
FRIDAY OCT 25, 8-10:30PM, CORNER OF STRAND THEATER
543 COLUMBIA RD, DORCHESTER 02125
UpRiver is a two part early warning / early action game for understanding and forecasting water levels along flood-prone areas of rivers. The first part is an analog game designed to help those in flood-prone communities better understand the models of river flooding and the importance of upstream-downstream communication for reducing flood losses. The second part, an SMS-based game played on cell phones, aims to both put into place an actual communication network that relays upstream information (thus triggering preparedness measures downstream), and to crowd-source river level data to improve computer models.
Civic Seed is an online multiplayer RPG and collective art project developed to prepare college students for community service. It was tested at Tufts University to enhance learning and deepen students' understanding of community contexts. An open source browser-based app developed in HTML 5 and node.js.
I helped create and lead the City of Boston’s Third Spaces Lab, an incubator of 18 distinct projects aimed at making Boston’s public spaces more welcoming, connective, and creative. We defined "Third Spaces" as places that contribute to our collective well-being, including everything from parks to barbershops to coffee shops. As part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ i-teams Program, the City embarked on these diverse initiatives aimed at sparking community-driven enhancements to vital spaces.
A six year video journey of the public art designed and created by Sabrina Dorsainvil and friends.
A peer reviewed book chapter introducing the design concept of “meaningful inefficiencies” as a way of thinking about civic systems that are open to the affordances of play and accommodate more than just the ‘good user’ – but also the marginalized, the emergent, and the rebellious.
I led the direction of a number of Smart City initiatives of the City of Boston, including the creation of the City’s first Smart City Playbook, the writing and management of the largest technology RFP to come directly out of the Mayor’s Office in the 21st Century (Beta Blocks), the creation of the Local Sense Lab - a way for the City to better understand the affordances (and pitfalls) of IoT sensor technology - and even our first ever Robot Block Party.
I helped develop and run the Engagement Lab, an applied research lab at Emerson College that designs and studies civic technology, engagement, and play. The Lab’s work has ranged from the design and development of engagement games, to the organization of civic technology researchers and practitioners from around the world, to the dissemination and teaching of playful user experience design in both digital and analog contexts. During my time as managing director, the Lab grew from a partnership of two working out of a faculty offce and cubicle, to a staff of over 20 designers, developers, project managers, faculty, and students, working collaboratively in a dedicated lab space that served as both a center for academic research and an independent, self-funding design studio.
Community PlanIt was a game for community planning, used for processes and issues ranging from the City of Detroit’s Long Term Plan, to youth unemployment in Moldova, to school planning in the LA Unified School District and Boston Public Schools.
The SYITF collective formed in 2021 following a big “sweep” of Boston’s largest tent encampment for unhoused people. Our team members came to the project with varied backgrounds including peer support, health justice advocacy, and community co-design.
As stories stigmatizing and disempowering unhoused people made headlines, we looked for creative ways to support members of the tent encampment in sharing their more nuanced and on-the-ground stories.
Civic Brookline is a new, experimental local multimedia platform developed in Brookline, MA. With the disappearance of local newspapers, Civic Brookline aims to be one piece of the puzzle for engaging local residents in the news and culture that hits home the most. I led the design and development of platform, which aims to expand to other cities under the Civic [Your Town] brand.
Designing in the cracks, fissures, and in-betweens of civic life: where jurisdiction is unclear, struggles and taboo subjects abound, and the unexpected is a building block for beginning something New. The is the place the New Urban Mechanics work.
The New Urban Mechanics Labs is a new, emerging place where these mechanics, these civic innovators, these caregivers standing alone on limbs trying something new, can call a living room. A place to share, to be seen, to rest, to refuel, to be inspired, to experiment, to find the next right thing to do in building a more peaceful, equitable, and curious world.
Caring at the Threshold: Innovation as Care
A Paper by Stephen Walter & Kim Lucas where we argue innovation is a form of care.
View the extended abstract here.
As a member of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, I helped write the City of Boston’s first ever Civic Research Agenda, which we described as: “A primer on the questions we're asking, the problems that stump us, and the partnerships we need.” Read it here!
With Pablo Suarez, Director of Innovation of the International Red Cross / Red Crescent Climate Centre, and Eric Gordon, I helped write and design this guide for designing what we called “Engagement Games” - games that facilitate real-world actions. Or more specifically, games where the very moves one makes are themselves actions in the real world that contribute to the solving of a problem.
I helped launch a multiyear partnership between the United Nations Development Programme and the Engagement Lab and grew interest UN-wide over the power of serious games for issues related to international development, human rights, and sustainability. This started with co-designing and leading a series of game design for social change workshops in Cairo, Moldova, and Bhutan, where a number of projects, both big and small, were born, some of which are still going strong today, 10 years later. Watch a video!
The global view of risk management as an unaffordable cost, especially in developing countries. The game Risk Horizon allows participants to learn risk management through experiential gameplay. More than 5,000 government employees worldwide found it to be the most memorable part of the course, highlighting its potential to change perceptions of risk management as a development tool.
A digital game that immerses players in a fictional world called Zariba, where they act as World Bank Results-Based Financing (RBF) for Health consultants, designing and implementing an RBF program. They face real-world challenges and adapt their strategies to meet healthcare service goals. The game has two phases and lasts 45 minutes, with the option to replay. In Phase 1, players explore, gather information, and create an RBF program proposal. In Phase 2, they monitor and adapt the program in real time. Developed with the World Bank and played by hundreds of health policy experts around the world.
A video of the Greater Boston Metropolitan Waterworks Museum.
