metamethods

[metamethods]

[metamethods]

[metamethods]

[metamethods]

research-driven problem-solving approach

[metamethods]

I seek to recognize the role of my perspective and personal position in framing and thus *approaching* any “problem”. Previously, I’ve worked with the Imaginaries Lab, Dynamic Decision Making Lab, Learning Media Design Center and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute all at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, PA.

I’ve also collaborated with project partners from the EU Joint Research Center in Petten, Netherlands, Quicksand Studio and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, as well as with BBROOD, SciBeh, and Suburb Futures, remotely. The set of projects collected here have been produced in cycles characterized by systems-thinking and inclusive knowledge-building.

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In Spotlight

BAYONNE GREEN: A CITIZEN INITIATIVE TO CONNECT THE GREENWAY AS AN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM

Bayonne Green is a parks and mobility advocacy group facilitating communication between residents, businesses, and elected officials in support of Greenway-oriented development in Bayonne, NJ.

The Bayonne Green, inspired by the prompt, “Bayonne Gem of the Hudson”, is a 2-in-1 park and micromobility greenway network: a small loop for getting around town and a big loop for getting around the bay.

Sign the petition: https://change.org/bayonnegreen

Ernst Neizvestny Estate Sculpture Park Meditation

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XriWBNYzlWA&ab_channel=MisoDko

CHARITY EVENT FOR KHARKIV SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, UKRAINE

Assisted Alec Rovensky with event planning and run of show. Coordinated communication and guided the volunteer team.

Click here to visit the event page.

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Past Projects

Meta

How can documentation practices support personal and institutional learning through creative inquiry?

What does the social structure in collective decision making feel like?

How can game play be used as a research device for eliciting public attitudes & sentiment towards transit maintenance?

Can a science research paper take a different form to become relevant to broader audiences and build community engagement?

Can a report on collective intelligence in science communication be written through a process that is itself collectively intelligent?

What are practical and aspirational recommendations for participatory civic practices of which citizen bodies across the US can learn?

Do I have agency to activate research in order to materialize change where I live?

Methods

"DESIGN PROBE" of documentation practices in hybrid work environments

WORKSHOP DESIGN & FACILITATION

Creating a BOARD GAME AS A RESEARCH TOOL

COMMUNICATION DESIGN APPLIED TO SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING

META-COGNIZANT COLLECTIVE AUTHORSHIP PROTOCOL to report on the state of SCIENCE COMMUNICATION

SYNTHESIS OF GOVERNANCE BEST PRACTICES accompanied by ESSAY WRITING

MOBILITY AND PARKS RESEARCH AND ADVOCACY

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DESIGN/ USER RESEARCH

Team: Marti Louw, Daragh Byrne, Ricky Chen

literature review; distilling key takeaways; (research) study design; instructing, supervising and facilitating research activity; data collection and analysis; generating insights; presenting findings to key stakeholders; report writing

During this research, my team used a research-through-design approach to develop and deploy a design probe into students’ documentation practices. Our “pictorial” (visually rich report) for this work was published and accepted to the 2021 Conference on Creativity and Cognition. Our key finding is that a  “lingua franca” seemed to emerge in the documentation of creative processes, across seemingly very different disciplines.

This project was funded by a NSF-grant.

read the full paper

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WORKSHOP DESIGN + FACILITATION FOR COLLECTIVE DECISION MAKING

Independent project

workshop facilitation; conversation design; community engagement; hosting educational event; applying behavioral insights in policy recommendations; studying social infrastructure of trust

"[Citizenship] is an ordinary space of activity that many people occupy without thinking much about it."

– Lauren Berlant

Speculation and imagination are two underutilized channels of citizenship that I wanted to introduce to participants through their engagement with a prompt - in somewhat suspended reality. I ask participants to consider their individual positions from the viewpoint of “stakeholder”, “civic shareholder”, and “citizen”, with the goal of fostering deeper reflection on familiar notions of citizenship and pinpointing the influences of power, both in traditional models of policymaking and in alternative models incorporating "codesign". I used dialogic design and micromobility policy research to design a workshop conversation prompt to interrogate implicit individual "models of belonging".

try out the Models of Belonging prompt

read about applying "beta-testing" in policymaking

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RESEARCH THROUGH DESIGN: TRANSIT MAINTENANCE MULTIPLAYER GAME

Team: Dan Lockton, Christianne Francovich, Amber Lee

game design; workshop facilitation; hybrid event hosting; data collection and analysis; report writing

This is a multiplayer boardgame our team developed in Figma and deployed during a live zoom event in conjunction with the Festival of Maintenance. We used a "research- through-design" approach to probe how people think about maintenance by observing their exploration of the system and their game-play strategies. The objective is to ensure that the transit system operates without interruption. The game served as a halfway meeting point, where one half we extend a play scheme that reflects our own understanding of maintenance in transit, and the other half is the players responding and through their play affirming or surprising our initial expectations of them. We intended to expand “public imaginaries” (consciousness) in order to facilitate a more nuanced and complex “understanding” of the role of maintenance in ensuring the smooth operation of transit.

read our Medium post detailing our process, how we designed the game, report from the live event, and how we analyzed the data after

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SCIENCE COMMUNICATION STRATEGY & DESIGN - LIGHTWEIGHT KNOWLEDGE ZINE

A science paper in a popular form. Introducing the lab as a site of knowledge-production, one page at a time.

Team: Cleotilde Gonzalez

social media management; instructional writing; web design and build; interviewing; surveying; presenting to internal teams; making recommendations; research synthesis; communication design; digital publication; community engagement

I worked on a comprehensive science communication design, social media, and community engagement project for the Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University during fall 2021. In the second phase of my role, by combining modalities of research and meta-research, I iterated a paper on trust and deceptive signaling that I was investigating at the lab myself, and turned it into a “web-zine-site” (an interactive hybrid publication).

This project explores possibilities of building knowledge-exchange infrastructure.

browse the resource kit Science and Media-critical Thinking

read ISSUE 1 OF #madeAtDDMLab

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A Collective Intelligence and Authorship Experiment in Science Communication

Team: Dawn Holford, Angelo Fasce, Katy Tapper, Ulrike Hahn, Stephan Lewanowsky, and other contributors (see document for full list)

editorial role; experimenting with AI generative writing; team coordination; experimenting with collective decision making

I served as 1 of 6 lead authors of the BehSci SciComm Manifesto. In my role I was assigned as editor for a group of 3 authors, among a total of 16 contributors. I translated the submitted pieces of writing into voter-suggested science communication propositions - in order to experiment with using collective intelligence to generate declarative thinking. We wrote the document itself also through a "collectively intelligent" process. The resulting body of text is hosted online and is founded partially on Pol.is, which we used to integrate public input in the early stages. A paper written based on the original manifesto has been accepted to the Science Communication (SC) journal.

read the manifesto

read the paper

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HANDBOOK FOR PARTICIPATORY CIVIC PRACTICES - "PRIMER"

(excerpts)

Team: Erica Dorn

literature review; information synthesis; writing educational material

An open invite/ open input document compiling both practical and aspirational recommendations for advancing participatory civic practices in all municipal locales, and in US suburbs especially.

visit the primer hosted online on Google Docs and feel welcome to add your input as comments in the document

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BAYONNE GREEN: PARKS & MOBILITY ADVOCACY GROUP initiating CODESIGN

Team: Rebecca Graves, Diane Brennan, Marissa Kline-Gonzalez, Devan Stierney

web design and build, campaign lead and coordination, community engagement, mobility research

I wanted to test whether I have agency to enact material change where I live among my local communities through direct action. Since living in Bayonne, NJ I’ve become increasingly pained by the unfortunate fact, that despite living just 30min by bike to a 1 stop connection (with PATH train) to NYC, prevailing public attitude and the cultural status quo prevent more efficient and possibly also more attractive travel within and between Bayonne and New York.

links to the petition, greenway network homepage, and codesign space

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FOOD SYSTEMS DESIGN RESEARCH

Team: Isabelle Makay, Andrea Boscaro; photography by Felix Müller

Making Space in the Interface is an inquiry into the various shopping settings that influence and reinforce consumption habits. We wanted to better understand where we could find leverage points in the agri-business dynamics of our food systems. We identified the supermarket food shopping setting as effectively a flat interface, “take and pay” - a fiction of branding, marketing, and consumption habituation that disconnects consumers from the many impacts of their purchases. We reasoned that tactility and taste could better withstand the manipulation of the various interfaces of consumerism. 

view our publication

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Thanks for visiting. If you made it this far, you might also be interested to visit me at are.na/miso-dem, where I'm participating in the movement to build collective knowledge on the Internet.

– Miso