📝 Portals, Toolkits, and Inventions
Our Spring Staff Selects roundup for your reading and speculating pleasure.
We know it’s been a while since many of us have been casually shopping in stores, but think back to browsing in a bookstore or a video rental shop. It could be exhilarating or overwhelming. Remember when you would walk around the aisles aimlessly until you found something you were in the mood for? Or maybe you coveted the Staff Selects section. In a small, handwritten note, someone who worked at the store would have written their personal reasons why you might like this particular title or movie. The opinion was there to inform your decision and encourage you to try something new. It reminds us of the public service algorithm we reported on in our previous newsletter, exploring public service broadcasting models. So that’s what we’re aiming for here.
We’ve got a mix of PDFs, YouTube videos, and essays from organizations and individuals we admire, and a little note about why we think you might like them too. Check it out, and let us know what you’re finding inspiring in the comments or on Twitter.
Staff Selects:
An Inventor’s Toolkit, Governance Futures Lab
A brilliant toolkit and card deck from the Institute for the Future exploring how government might change and evolve in the 21st Century. This toolkit leads you through a design process to become a more effective social inventor by offering ways to investigate, re-think, design, and prototype new forms of government at all levels. Perfect for your next governance-themed party. –Eli Pariser
Multimodal Social Media Analysis for Gang Violence Prevention, Safe Lab
In 2018, Philipp Blandfort and Desmond Patton of Safe Lab wrote this report to illustrate social media’s rising role in promoting gang activity and violence in cities across the United States — but also the challenges and pitfalls that come with social media surveillance. Computer scientists and social work researchers analyzed how Twitter mentions of gang associations could alert social workers and violence outreach workers to psychosocial factors and conditions within their communities. It’s a fascinating study on language, locality, and the threats neighborhoods face when media platforms unwittingly stoke rage and violence. New_ Public will highlight the work and research of Patton and Safe Lab in an upcoming newsletter. –Marina Garcia-Vasquez
The Invention of Public Space, Mariana Mogilevich
This illuminating lecture, titled “The Invention of Public Space" by Mariana Mogilevich for The Skyscraper Museum, speaks on late-1960s New York and is available to watch on YouTube in less time than a movie. It offers tangible insights into the promise of "democratic" spaces and the ways well-meaning designs can go wrong when they meet real communities. Mogilevich is a historian of architecture and urbanism. It's an engaging listen, and very relevant history. –Eli Pariser
Joshua Darr on How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization, Numlock News Substack
For one month in 2019, The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California removed all mention of President Donald Trump and national news from the opinion section with local and state-wide news filling the void. Political analyst Joshua Darr wrote a book on the project and this interview — from the excellent newsletter Numlock News — is a rare piece of good news in partisanship and local media. During the national news blockage, polarization slowed and readers loved the local opinion section. Sadly, after the experiment, the opinion editor took a buyout and the paper removed his position. But the results of the experiment are intriguing, and we’re interested in seeing more research on the civic effects of local news. –Josh Kramer
Portals to Beautiful Futures, Omidyar Network and Guild of Future Architects
Portals is a handsomely designed, visionary document from one of our funders, Omidyar Network, and an organization we admire, Guild of Future Architects. We (along with many other organizations) helped to develop the report. It not only suggests possible futures, but pushes you to engage, and challenges you to respond. The report centers four important questions: What if shared well-being became the standard of success for our nations? Are we ready to move from an era that rewards extraction to one that prioritizes regeneration? How will we move from an era of destabilizing information into an age of trusted wisdom? Can we dismantle industrial-age silos between work, home, education, play, and community? Writing from the year 2036, the report pulls on the loose threads of contemporary Western society. The “New Literacies” provocation is especially relevant: “Personal memory existed on hardware, software, and social media platforms — but collective memory? We didn’t prioritize that until much later.” Worth a read! –Eli Pariser
Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism, Bloomberg
Here, Kim Stanley Robinson, a speculative fiction novelist of wide acclaim, writes an essay about how cities may have to adapt to survive in the future. It’s a treat to read Robinson, who has written novels with premises like ‘what would living in a flooded NYC be like?’ (New York 2140), going deep on logistics and theoretical urban planning. We’ve always been really interested in cities at New_ Public, especially in thinking about how they work for the people who live in them. I love this line: “Talk of ‘smart cities’ is a little bit overblown, part of the AI craze, because the smarts in cities are always going to remain human.” –Josh Kramer
How to Map Nothing, Places Journal
This essay in Places Journal by Shannon Mattern, a professor of anthropology at The New School in New York City, is a dense, cross-disciplinary look at all of the unappreciated, informal work that goes into the “Great Pause,” or the widely-remarked upon pandemic hibernation. Mattern writes, “How do we map what’s on the flip-side of the dashboard or the Zoom screen — all the pulsing yet precarious systems that make suspension possible for those who can afford to retreat, and that function simultaneously as volatile yet vital lifelines for those who keep the systems running?” –Josh Kramer
Forming Connections: How To Find The Right Research Mode, Research Live
An article by Elen Lewis (requiring a free account) about how the pandemic has affected the field of qualitative research. Many firms switched from in-person interviews to technological solutions, but often had to adjust their approach on the fly. “Researchers can no longer read a room — or read individuals’ whole body language on screen,” writes Lewis. What worked before the pandemic sometimes wouldn’t work seamlessly online: a reality we’ve observed over and over since the pandemic began and know intuitively from personal experience. –Marina Garcia-Vasquez
We’d like to hear from you. What reports are you reading, projects you are following, design toolkits you are using to re-imagine our digital futures? We’d like to include your selects, too, in a future newsletter.
The New_ Public team
Illustration by Josh Kramer
Civic Signals is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.
I wanted to share a resource if it's ok. Not sure where is appropriate so lmk if you want me to delete this. May be of interest to your readers. A colleague of mine is teaching a course that starts Thursday. Tech Ethics Toolkit -Starts 5/20/21 5pm PT. https://extendedmind.mykajabi.com/a/2147487006/N28vTQCM