DS4SI is Expanding!

Support us in growing our new Design Gym.

DS4SI is opening the first ever Design Gym to engage people in world-building that begins at the scale of their neighborhood.

Imagine...

What if there was a Design Gym in your area, a place where you could go to workout 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.
 

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, DS4SI just launched our Design Gym.
 

The Design Gym is a a new community infrastructure, 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. The Design Gym engages communities directly in imagining the social, political, and physical infrastructures of their lives. Our goal is aesthetic justice for all.

The Design Gym is made possible through generous support from the Barr Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Luce Foundation, Surdna Foundation, and their Radical Imagination for Racial Justice initiative (via the MassArt Foundation and the City of Boston's Mayor's Office of Arts & Culture.)

The Design Gym is free and open to the community. We’d love your support in helping it grow!