I’m passionate about building brands through building community by leveraging culture and design as tools to help people better experience the world.
ABOUT
I’m passionate about building brands through building community by leveraging culture and design as tools to help people better experience the world.
ABOUT
Detroit's Little Village has a safety perception problem, and the distinction matters. When we started this project, we assumed the barrier to child independence was overprotective parenting. What we found was more nuanced. Parents trusted their kids. What they couldn't control was everyone else.
Three things became clear through our research: parents weren't worried about their children's behavior, they were worried about strangers. They needed reliable ways to know where their kids were. And their comfort with independence was tied to how trustworthy the environment felt, not just how ready their child was.
That shifted our entire frame. The problem wasn't about playground design. It was cultural. The informal village that once distributed the responsibility of watching over neighborhood kids no longer exists, and parents are feeling it.The strategic question became: how do you rebuild the conditions for a village to exist, without manufacturing culture?
Our answer was a three-part system. Playscapes transformed 2.5 miles of abandoned alleyways into connected play spaces linking schools, parks, and cultural centers. Wander, a parent-facing app, translated neighborhood sensor data into a real-time safety index, giving parents enough information that they didn't feel like they had to watch their kids constantly. And the Community Alley Trust created a neighborhood co-op for residents to maintain, steward, and program the alleys; not to force community, but to build the conditions for it to emerge naturally.
WANDER APP
SENSOR INFRASTRUCTURE
COMMUNITY ALLEY TRUST