Parsons Desis Lab

Amplify project working session on February 8

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• Posted on March 1, 2010.
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Design and Polit­ics on the Lower East Side
By Laura Forlano.

Is design depol­it­i­ciz­ing? Can design politi­cize? Will it enable the emer­gence of a new kind of politics?

These are some of the many questions—both the­or­et­ical and practical–raised dur­ing the first work­shop of the Amp­li­fy­ing Cre­at­ive Com­munit­ies (Amp­lify) pro­ject, which was held in early Feb­ru­ary by the Par­sons Design for Sus­tain­ab­il­ity and Social Innov­a­tion (DESIS) Lab in order to kick­off the Rockefeller-funded, multi-year pro­ject amplifyingcreativecommunities.net. The pro­ject seeks to “amp­lify by design” the many cre­at­ive and socially innov­at­ive activ­it­ies that New York­ers are engaged in through a close study of spe­cific neigh­bor­hoods. The work­shop con­vened a small group of Par­sons and The New School fac­ulty, design­ers from Milan Poly­tech­nic, tech­no­lo­gists from MIT, and stu­dents as well as par­ti­cipants from the design con­sultancy IDEO and com­munity part­ners such as Green Map www.greenmap.org/ and the Lower East Side Eco­logy Cen­ter www.lesecologycenter.org/.

The pur­pose of the work­shop was to share know­ledge about the his­tory and con­text of the Lower East Side as well as to brain­storm about the Amp­lify project’s pro­cesses, toolkits and activ­it­ies. The Lower East Side is the ini­tial site for this pro­ject due to its high pop­u­la­tion dens­ity, diverse eth­nic com­munit­ies, his­tory of res­ist­ance to gentri­fic­a­tion and strong polit­ical cap­ital. For example, the Lower East Side Eco­logy Cen­ter described the neighborhood’s trans­form­a­tion from the 1980’s – when it was remin­is­cent of a burnt out city in post-war Ger­many – to the present time in which there are over 50 thriv­ing com­munity gar­dens that con­nect local res­id­ents and increase their cohesiveness.

As part of Amp­lify, the gar­dens as well as other sites of sus­tain­ab­il­ity and social innov­a­tion are being mapped using Green Map’s open plat­form. The maps make “green liv­ing” vis­ible through the use of hun­dreds of stand­ard­ized icons that are used by map­makers world­wide. Through­out the Spring semester, over 70 stu­dents will use eth­no­graphic research meth­ods to study these sites as part of the Design and Every­day Exper­i­ence course in the Par­sons Design and Man­age­ment program.

How can design­ers inter­vene to scale up social innov­a­tion? Socially innov­at­ive prac­tices are often invis­ible, mis­un­der­stood and, even, some­times, illegal. They reside in a muddy, grey-zone below the radar before they are nor­mal­ized and accep­ted as valid. Yet, design­ers, research­ers and tech­no­lo­gists can play a role in mak­ing these activ­it­ies vis­ible to their own com­munit­ies as well as groups through­out the city and the world.

In order to achieve this, Amp­lify is build­ing a toolkit—a set of tech­niques, tools and activities—that is inten­ded for use by com­munit­ies. The work­shop show­cased two such examples by pro­ject part­ners. First, IDEO’s Human Centered Design Took­lit www.ideo.com/work/item/human-centered-design-toolkit/, which is free to down­load and open source, allows stu­dents, act­iv­ists and prac­ti­tion­ers to use eth­no­graphic and design research to visu­al­ize change within their own organ­iz­a­tions neigh­bor­hoods and cit­ies. In addi­tion, MIT’s Loc­ast locast.mit.edu/, a mobile media plat­form, aggreg­ates hyper­local civic media and maps it geographically.

In order to bet­ter under­stand the kinds of social innov­a­tion tak­ing place on the Lower East Side—from food coops to cloth­ing swaps—the work­shop con­cluded with a con­ver­sa­tion on the need for obser­va­tion and its role in com­mu­nic­at­ing, start­ing up, syn­er­giz­ing, mobil­iz­ing and enga­ging the com­munity. By map­ping the land­scape for the social eco­nomy and fol­low­ing local res­id­ents to the spaces of social innov­a­tion that they inhabit within their every­day lives—bathhouses, cafes, yoga stu­dios, gar­dens, bookstores—it is pos­sible to identify the people that serve as gate­keep­ers and inform­a­tion hubs within their communities.

While the work­shop did not seek to answer ques­tions about design and polit­ics, sev­eral hours later, the dis­cus­sion con­tin­ued over veg­gie bur­gers, coleslaw and baked pota­toes at Good Stuff diner.