Immersion + Engagement
My Brother's Keeper Action Plan
Co-Designing with Young Men of Color
My Brother's Keeper is an initiative of Barack Obama and adopted by Thrive Chicago. The Action Plan is a concrete, actionable set of principles for organizations in Chicago to guide their work in a focused and direct manner towards positive life outcomes for young men of color in the city. It was co-designed with young men of color across Chicago and graduate students at the Institute of Design over a six-week period. Efforts were channeled in three distinct, but related, areas where the legacy of structural racism and segregation in Chicago has had deleterious consequences: education, employment, and health and wellness. My team focused on education and collaborated closely with students from Muchin College Prep in downtown Chicago.
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Work was conducted in collaboration with graduate students in Chris Rudd's co-design workshop at the Institute of Design and young men from Muchin College Prep, Gary Comer College Prep, and BUILD Chicago.
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View the full Action Plan report here.
Stories to Action
Stories to Action was an independent capstone project completed during my time as a BUILD Fellow in Denver, Colorado. The project sought to explore innovative community engagement methodologies as a way to turn storytelling into community-led initiatives.
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I began the project by engaging community leaders to learn more about engagement techniques and local contexts. Two public engagement events were held as a generative research process that eventually led to the design of a campaign proposal prototype to the City of Denver Office of Storytelling.
Everywhere and Somewhere
This exhibition represents a speculative future for the city of Toronto. Through research and design prototyping our team speculated a return-to-nature future guided by Native ideologies and emerging technologies.
Everywhere and Somewhere represents Toronto as a living city in 2050, defined by a temporal landscape of networked villages and dynamic community identities. In contrast to the idea of a confused and lost identity commonly represented by the phrase "everywhere and nowhere", Everywhere and Somewhere intends to provocate what might characterize "place" in the near future of Toronto.
Work was conducted in collaboration with Sonia Lala, Melissa Cadet, and Tyler Besecker.
Chandigarh Re-Think Urban Edge Exhibition and Symposium
The Urban Edge Exhibition and Symposium was held at the Alliance Française de Chandigarh in India in the Fall of 2015. The exhibition collates work conducted throughout the year as part of the Urban Edge Prize studio and workshop at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in conjunction with the Chandigarh College of Architecture. Work represents the analysis of two “edge” sites in Chandigarh - one positioned within the formal confines of the city and the other on its periphery. These studies investigated the urban edge as both a physical boundary and as a metaphoric concept within the changing, global city.
Work was conducted with the direction of Dr. Manu P. Sobti and Prof. Sangeeta Bagga-Mehta, and in collaboration with Richard VanDerWal.
Information on the publication of this work can be found here.
