REPPING NEIGHBORLY LIFE
DS4SI’s design gym collectively reimagines everyday infrastructures
ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUEAt DS4SI, we want to question and reimagine our everyday lives in community, and we have learned that people do their most imaginative work when they get out of their heads and imagine with their whole selves: mind, body, heart and soul. In recent years, our studio has focused on designing what we call “productive fictions,” or small portals into a not-yet-existing world we want. We invite people to step in and imagine how they would want to reshape their worlds, including their everyday lives and the public infrastructures and institutions that shape them. Crucially, these productive fictions are intentionally unfinished; we design them to be tinkered with and co-produced because we hope this collective imagination work can start in real time, as people engage with one another in this fictional world.
Since the studio’s early days, we have always envisioned having an experiential learning space where people can come together and work out their ideas for what they want their lives and society to look like. In 2021, we partnered with Radical Imagination for Racial Justice (RIRJ Boston)1 to explore how we might support local BIPOC artists who want to prototype new ways of addressing systemic issues, particularly racial injustice. We asked what it might look like to turn our studio “inside out” into a practice space for people to collectively design social interventions.
We have long been drawn to the dōjō, rather than the classroom, as a spatial metaphor because of its emphasis on training, exercises, and rituals. We created the Design Gym as a neighborhood spot for tricksters, artists, urbanists, neighbors, and people who want to train their social imagination muscles. As we continue building out this first Design Gym in Upham’s Corner, we’re creating workout equipment and routines for sensing, intervening in, and reimagining how social ideas (such as racial capitalism, imperialism, anthropocentrism) shape our everyday lives.
From the beginning, the Design Gym was envisioned as a training space for collectively working out ideas and tending to public culture. DS4SI was started twenty years ago to reconceptualize and practice new ways of approaching social change and cultivating a stronger public. We acknowledge that our notion of “the public” is still a work-in-progress—that is, we are still working out new ways of seeing and relating with one another: new spaces for dialogue and play; new infrastructures that remind us that “public” means all of us, and a new politics grounded in a vibrant and capacious public imagination.2 This work cannot be the sole responsibility of elected officials or the social justice sector; we need to meet, attract and inspire a broad cross-section of the public, especially our communities who have been colonized, disenfranchised, and divested from.
To set up the Design Gym as a public infrastructure, we grounded our work in several design principles: strangeness, co-design, a relational ethos, and emergence.
We want to see our community using the gym to test out their own iterations of existing infrastructures... or imagining new interventions into public life.
Strangeness
We believe strange and unfamiliar spaces can keep us on our toes and help us notice what we assume to be normal and unchangeable. We often look for social and physical ways to pique our gym members’ curiosities and move through their discomforts with not knowing. For example, the Design Gym hosted a class in Fall 2024 (Collective Protocols for Intervening Up co-led by Tania Bruguera, Danny Clarke, Kenneth Bailey, Melissa Teng, and Anulfo Baez) where students were prompted to question and play with everything in the Design Gym as if it were a theater set. Students explored the space—poking, touching, opening, and rearranging things—making the familiar strange. We ask: How might spaces encourage us to question and experiment with the quotidian and familiar?
Co-design
We intentionally include slippery and unfinished elements in the Design Gym as a living prototype. As part of the Boston People’s Response network, an initiative imagining and advocating for mental health crisis response without police, our neighbors at The City School tested and co-led a “People’s Response Center Pop-Up” at the Design Gym. This was inspired by one of our earlier prototypes, a Social Emergency Response Center (SERC) and its four activity quadrants: plotting, making, healing, and cooking. Instead of a traditional meeting (e.g. sitting, talking, and listening), this public pop-up adapted the Design Gym to facilitate new modes of connection and meet their community’s engagement needs. They made space for stewing homemade chili and herbal tea, provided a large table for drawing representations of mental health in the community, designated a space to make buttons, and installed a board for participants to add ideas to the broader campaign. This spatial approach helped people to engage with mental health through a wide range of expressions, tend to their bodies’ desires, and work from a sense of collective aliveness. The City School is hoping to bring these elements to future activations and advocacy work. We ask: How might spaces be staged to encourage co-design, additions, adaptations, and new iterations?
We believe strange and unfamiliar spaces can keep us on our toes and help us notice what we assume to be normal and unchangeable. We often look for social and physical ways to pique our gym members’ curiosities and move through their discomforts with not knowing. For example, the Design Gym hosted a class in Fall 2024 (Collective Protocols for Intervening Up co-led by Tania Bruguera, Danny Clarke, Kenneth Bailey, Melissa Teng, and Anulfo Baez) where students were prompted to question and play with everything in the Design Gym as if it were a theater set. Students explored the space—poking, touching, opening, and rearranging things—making the familiar strange. We ask: How might spaces encourage us to question and experiment with the quotidian and familiar?
Co-design
We intentionally include slippery and unfinished elements in the Design Gym as a living prototype. As part of the Boston People’s Response network, an initiative imagining and advocating for mental health crisis response without police, our neighbors at The City School tested and co-led a “People’s Response Center Pop-Up” at the Design Gym. This was inspired by one of our earlier prototypes, a Social Emergency Response Center (SERC) and its four activity quadrants: plotting, making, healing, and cooking. Instead of a traditional meeting (e.g. sitting, talking, and listening), this public pop-up adapted the Design Gym to facilitate new modes of connection and meet their community’s engagement needs. They made space for stewing homemade chili and herbal tea, provided a large table for drawing representations of mental health in the community, designated a space to make buttons, and installed a board for participants to add ideas to the broader campaign. This spatial approach helped people to engage with mental health through a wide range of expressions, tend to their bodies’ desires, and work from a sense of collective aliveness. The City School is hoping to bring these elements to future activations and advocacy work. We ask: How might spaces be staged to encourage co-design, additions, adaptations, and new iterations?
A relational ethos
In his role as the Design Gym Lead, Anulfo Baez brings a focus on welcoming people into the studio, helping folks feel belonging and fed, and tending to a culture that sees us as part of a larger social fabric. This care work manifests in various ways, from extending personal invitations to classes to facilitating connections between people with shared interests. We describe the Design Gym as a “relational infrastructure,” or a social space designed for rehearsing deeper ways of relating with one another and asking each other: How did being in this social space feel? How do we do this together? If the Design Gym did not have this ethos of pointing people towards each other, it'd be just a maker space for individual work. We ask: How might spaces welcome our whole selves and center radical relationship-making—to each other, to space, and to ecology?
Emergence
Just as we shape spaces, spaces also shape us—our behaviors, norms and sense of possibility. As much as we want to encourage new ways of relating in the Design Gym, we know we can’t force it by saying to people, “Be together!” In game design language, that breaks the “magic circle.” If we want a certain set of things to happen, we have to design the conditions that allow these things to emerge. Designing for emergence requires paying attention and tending to every encounter within a space. We ask: How might spaces fan the flames of relation?
What if the social effects from all of our interventions—the wonder, the belief in a different everyday life, the possible relationships—were to accumulate until we could step into a whole other culture, one that we would produce together?
But what if our communities were to produce multiple public infrastructures and scenes around the city? What if the social effects from all of our interventions—the wonder, the belief in a different everyday life, the possible relationships—were to accumulate until we could step into a whole other culture, one that we would produce together?
1. At the time a partnership between MassArt (Ceci Méndez-Ortiz, Chandra Méndez-Ortiz) and City of Boston (Kara Elliott-Ortega). For more information, visit the Radical Imagination for Racial Justice website.
2. The Public: A Work in Progress, Kenneth Bailey and Lori Lobenstine.