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Workshops, speaking, and events



Workshop: BetaNYC Mobility For All

I organized a workshop on imagining alternative transportation futures at BetaNYC's Mobility for All Challenge, as part of National Civic Day of Hacking. I designed a session to hold a safe space for dialogue to happen around ways that we keep ourselves and authentic as we make our through the city to our jobs, friends, and lovers.

Photograph by Charlie Hartwell

From a personal perspective, as someone who is transgender, there is a constant spectre that follows me where I've being targeted for who I am. I can't allow fear to grip my life but I also need to keep myself safe. I shared with the group what safety and authenticity means to me and in this process they recprocated what it means for them. I shared healing arts techniques and ways to reduce stress through Breathwork and mindfulness practices. We offered this to other groups participating as well. To share what we've discussed, I asked each person to make a collage from magazines and newspapers, as well as write a letter to a future version of themselves on how they might navigate the city authentically. Five years from the event, I'll send these letters back to them.

A group dialogue on safety and authenticity

Gehl Institute: From Inclusion to Equity. Detroit, MI

Gehl Institute’s Public x Design was annual convening on public space design that took place in September 2018 in Detroit, Michigan. 

Speaking with Viranel Clerard about Detroit’s Murals

I presented work on making Detroit's murals more accessible with artist Viranel Clerard at Gehl's Public Life event in Detroit. In early 2019, I got in touch with Viranel after reading about his work on Curbed. I was inspired by his ability to catalogue murals he's come across in Detroit and how he was able to do all of this work while juggling two jobs. I asked if he was interested in cataloguing the murals by creating a machine-readable database to map them and make connections to other sources of city data. He responded quickly saying he was very interested and I began the process to transfer his squarespace website into a google sheet that could be automatically updated as he updates his site. From there, I created an ETL job using Stae to create an API feed and map them across Detroit.


Roundtable discussion with Viranel about the social impact of Detroit’s Murals

One particular analysis is to look at the proximity of murals to new building demolitions using a buffer tool like turf.js. A map of Detroit's murals becomes an advocacy tool to protect murals at risk or a tool to understand where development in the city is occurring in relation to murals.

Blog Post:  https://medium.com/city-as-a-service/mapping-detroits-murals-588b396d0a7c
Map of Detroit’s Murals:  https://detroit-murals.glitch.me/

Hackathon Mentorship 

As part of growing Stae's civic data API usage, I coordinated hackathons and mentored groups on how to incorporate the civic data API into their challenge. Part of my introduction to API usage involved a specific challenge developed with organizers where people would use civic data as part of their hack.



Helping map user flows at Gehl Public Life Data Protocol Hackathon