Jeremy Beaudry
Projects, Research & Texts

SMSC at ISEA2009

Posted on August 23rd, 2009 in collaboration, project news and tagged action mill, activism, design, game theory, presentation, social media, uarts

I will be traveling to Belfast on Tuesday to attend ISEA2009, the International Symposium on Electronic Art. I will also be giving a short presentation on the Social Media for Social Change project. As a refresher, SMSC is a design research collaboration between me, three undergraduate students, and members of the Action Mill that is funded by the Philadelphia Applied Research Lab at the University of the Arts. The fundamental question we are asking is: how can we reimagine civil discourse in the context of social media and networked communication? Our objectives are: 1) to learn more about human interaction (online and offline); 2) to create structural changes (as opposed to merely tweaking existing tools); and 3) to build environments that accommodate divergent perspectives, mediate disagreement, and encourage civil debate.

Quite unexpectedly, the deliverable we have produced at the close of this first phase is a haptic board game called The NIMBY Game. Using real-world land use and zoning dilemmas often faced in cities, players must negotiate these in order to collectively plan their city while balancing the pressures of self-inerest and common good. We think it’s quite useful for understanding better structures for civil discourse — and it’s also pretty fun to play. We’d like to release the game as a limited edition multiple once the final glitches are worked out. (As Rob from the Action Mill says, “Board games are the new indy film.” Works for us!)

Anyway, if you’re going to be in Belfast for ISEA and trying to determine which of the myriad presentations and panels to attend, please do come. I present on Saturday, August 29 at 14:30 in a location called “Waterfront Hall Bar I and II” at the University of Ulster. See you then.

UPDATE: Here are the slides of the presentation I gave:

The Think Tank Descends Upon Boston (Somerville, to be precise)

Posted on April 15th, 2009 in activism, collaboration, project news and tagged activism, art, boston, gentrification, presentation, public transportation, thinktank

Several Directors from the Think Tank that has yet to be named (including me) converged in Boston a couple weekends ago to present a project called “Community” in Question: Conversations and readings on art, activism, and community vis-à-vis the Green Line Expansion in which we investigated the proposed public transportation expansion (MBTA Green Line) into Somerville-Medford to examine how residents respond to (both for and against) changes in transportation and how transportation effects their cities. The project was developed for a conference on the intersection of art and activism at Tufts University, and, while the conference proceedings I attended were rather exasperating, I think our project was one of the TT’s most successful to date. We organized a talking/walking tour along a portion of the proposed transit expansion Somerville and then culminated at the Davis Square T stop on the Red Line in Somerville’s largely gentrified central hub. The unique opportunity here was to observe and discuss the effects of the previous expansion (dating from the mid-80s) on the community 25 years hence in order to consider the potential effects of Green Line expansion on another part of Somerville and adjacent Medford. In the process of developing the project we contacted and invited key stakeholders and policy makers from the community to offer their expertise and perspectives, and several of these folks joined our walk and greatly enriched the conversation. Also noteworthy is the release of Vol. IV in the series of occassional readers which compiles several texts on the following themes related to the question of community: Theoretical discussions on Community, Learning from Activists/Organizers: How to participate in a community, [Common] Space, Artistic responses to Community, Building Communities.