The Engagement Lab - An applied research lab focusing on the development and study of civic technology and playful systems.
"Meaningful Inefficiencies: Resisting the Logic of Technological Efficiency in the Design of Civic Systems" - A book chapter co-written with Dr. Eric Gordon for the upcoming
Civic Media Reader by MIT Press.
Games for Development- An initiative in partnership with the UNDP aiming to utilize games to spark social change, entrepeneurship, and design thinking in developing communities around the world. We've piloted the program in Moldova, Bhutan, and Egypt, including a year-long academy and design partnership with UNDP in Cairo.
The Civic Media Project- The first-ever online peer-reviewed collection of case studies on civic media and technology projects from around the world.
Boston Civic Media Consortium and Annual Conference- A collaboration between universities, NGOs, and government for fostering the research and design of civic media in the Boston area. Supported by Microsoft and the Teagle Foundation.
UpRiver -
Developed with the International Red Cross / Red Crescent Climate Centre, UpRiver is a two part early warning / early action game for understanding and predicting river levels along flood-prone areas of rivers in the developing world. The first part is an analog game designed to help those in flood-prone communities better understand the nuances of river flooding and the importance of upstream-downstream communication. The second part, an SMS-based game played on cellphones, aims to further these concepts and both put into place an actual communication network for relaying upstream information and to crowd source river level data to improve computer models. The game was co-designed with communities along the Zambezi River in Zambia.
Community PlanIt - Community PlanIt is an online social game for community planning and local fundraising. It has been implemented in the cities of Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Salem, MA, Quincy, MA, Cape Cod, and Malmo, Sweden, with upcoming games in San Jose, Moldova, and Cape Town. The game is a platform that has been used in a variety of contexts, including urban planning, school quality, environmental issues, and media literacy. It has been played by over six thousand people, who have contributed over 55,000 comments to local planning initiatives.
Civic Seed - Civic Seed is an online RPG, collective art piece, and civic resume generator for college students hoping to volunteer in communities, designed in collaboration with Tufts University’s Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. While many civic education programs teach students using traditional pedagogical methods of assigned readings or online learning modules, Civic Seed uses the interactive structure and narrative of a game to compel players to actively seek out, reflect upon, and apply content as they gain new knowledge. The game is set in a world that has mysteriously lost its color. Players strive to help their guide uncover the mysteries of the world by gathering skills for volunteering, exploring the land, solving puzzles, and recoloring the environment. Game actions and responses are recorded and transformed into a civic resume -- a sharable profile, owned by the player, that lets partners understand a student's background, skills, goals, and motivations.
Engagement Games: A Case for Designing Games to Facilitate Real World Action- A guidebook for community organizations, humanitarian workers, and other practitioners hoping to engage stakeholders in taking action on local issues.
"Becoming Interesting: Movement and Attention Design" - An early essay.
"Cinematic Asylum" An early essay on possible feminist value of Lars von Trier’s
Antichrist and artistic excess.
"Spiraling Thoughts: Transcribing the Images of Time and Memory" - Undergrad Honors Thesis Articulation.
Dot Experiment - A response to William James and designing attention.
Click Here To Read the Accompanying Blog.
W-E-B - Hijacking the Bing search engine API and draining it of its surrealism; a web project (which at this point is pretty broken) with sound!
Not Coded - Some dabbling with javascript and jQuery.
wake-down.com - My first attempt at the internet from when I was a baby.