This year I had the opportunity to attend the 2016 AIA Convention as a speaker, talking about the path to licensure and as a scholarship recipient at the Equity by Design Hackathon!
At the Hackathon I paired up with Julia Mandell, Amy Kalar and Obi Okolo. Throughout the afternoon our “hacking” led us to AGORA – an app that mashes up yelp, geolocation and cloud-based building information modeling. It’s a feedback software application that would link public comments about buildings to spatial tags within buildings. The app would also provide information on how the building came together – the people and the processes behind the design (that’s you, architects!). We’re not coders and the hackathon only lasted an afternoon, so for the time being we let go of the technical specifics and focused on the experience we wanted to facilitate.
We wrote an in-depth piece about our experience for the Equity by Design blog. Check it out to learn about our team’s full experience. Plus, a SXSW Eco team member heard our pitch at the hackathon and asked us to submit our idea for their Place by Design Competition. We’re excited to see where this potential opportunity leads us!
The 2025 OpenLAB Boston studio work will be exhibited at Virginia Tech Monday, March 2nd through Wednesday, March 4th.
Please join us for the following events on Monday, March 2nd:
11:00am - Lecture with Parke MacDowell
1:00pm Lobby talk with Kevin Sullivan
This year’s studio identifies seven sites along the frayed edges of Boston’s Greenway. The Greenway is a one-mile-long linear park running through the heart of the city, reconnecting downtown Boston with its waterfront. Many of the parcels along its edges remain undeveloped and present mute, blank facades to the public realm. Addressing and repairing these edges through acts of infilling, layering, grafting, framing, and placemaking is the core focus of the studio—SUTURE.