People

William Gibson once said: “The future is already here... it's just not well distributed yet.” 

In many ways, this was Nigel Jacob’s starting point in thinking about how technology and design permeate the everyday experience of people and communities.. especially the notion of what that value is and how it is distributed (and to whom). Nigel began his work as a scientist technologist and backed his way into becoming a humanist. He has been described as a “folk hero” of the Civic Innovation movement (Prof. Stephen Goldsmith) due to the breakthrough work he led at the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, a world-wide, first-of-its-kind Civic-Design action lab in Boston City Hall.

The civic innovation movement and the work of New Urban Mechanics was and is about exploring the space where institutions (like Government, Universities, etc) can and should bring value to the lives of people in which they are embedded. A key element of this work has been about moving those institutions to become more human-centric in their orientation. Often this means understanding the subtleties of how to drive change in complex, network-based organizations and how to encourage and support cultures of innovation and risk-taking to take root therein. This approach led to numerous collaborative projects between the City of Boston, local universities (Harvard, MIT, Boston University, etc), and local advocacy organizations and startups.

Nigel  is a designer-experimentalist of civic systems. He works at the edges of systems where community overlaps with institutions to bring value to both. He works with neighborhoods and local institutions to explore (and prototype possible futures and to ensure they can collaborate to scale up these visions in order to keep their neighborhoods resilient and convivial for all.

Nigel’s mantra is: Explore. Experiment. Evaluate. Rinse and Repeat. While Design practice is powerful. It also often falls short when the needs of the Communities or Communities are considered. Good Civic design happens in the open where the Neighborhood is deeply engaged and the question of “who gets to Design?” is grappled-with in the open. 

Kim is an academic-practitioner who is committed to community-driven civic research, innovation in city-university collaborations, and leveraging our collective expertise for the social good. Kim previously served as Interim Executive Director at Metrolab Network and Director of Civic Research for the City of Boston. Kim’s research focuses on early childhood policy, the child care market, and civic tech policy. Their practical experience includes over a decade of innovation in community-engaged research.

Part researcher, part practitioner, and part muppet, Kim has consistently kept one foot in the ivory tower and one foot on the ground, pairing research with practice to seek real solutions to social policy and planning problems. Questioning who we think of as ‘expert’ and how stakeholders identify ‘value’ are two common threads that pervade their work. Kim holds a BA in Psychology and Sociology from UCLA, an MA in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning and Child Development from Tufts University, and a PhD from the the School of Social Policy and Sociology at Brandeis University, where their dissertation was an economic sociological exploration of the ‘value’ of the early childhood workforce.

Kim developed, directed, and wrote the first-in-the-nation municipal Civic Research Agenda and directed other such programs as Bostons Saves  and the Boston Area Research Initiative.

Kim is currently Professor of the Practice in Public Policy and Economic Justice at Northeastern University, Associate Director for Civic Research of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, and Associate Director for Civic Research at the Boston Area Research Initiative. 

Despite all this work, Kim still has time to deal with two ridiculous / ridiculously cute dogs, whose names will remain anonymous for their safety.  

Kim's catchphrase: "Try everything. Twice."

Stephen Walter has been working as a researcher, designer, and program director at the intersection of technology, community, and care for the past 15 years. He's worked with organizations such as the International Red Cross / Red Crescent, the UN, the Boston Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, and was the founding managing director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson College.  He has worked in over 20 countries around the world, and about the same number of cities in the US, where he works deeply with communities to explore more flexible, playful, and creative ways that democracy and care become everyday acts of human interaction. What’s this about democracy? 

Stealing and the words of many others, steve might, if he's pressed, define democracy as “a system of community built upon the mutual give-and-take of experience with each other; where shared creativity, be it via cooperation or conflict, is the building block of all governing systems.... Where a working democracy is one in which, every day, people get to experience difference, the unexpected, and the boundless newness of each other, and this experience gets added back into the community’s systems of governance and technologies so that they may change, refresh, or unfurl to touch new margins, edges, and ways of being.... And where a broken democracy is one in which the machine is already made and the parts are soldered in, and there are no tools to be creative, to generate new experiences, to learn from said experiences, to change. ” - 🐶

He's currently serving as the Director of Special Projects for the Brookline Interactive Group, a local  nonprofit community media center, and is a partner of See You In The Future, a community-rooted art collective that works with guests of shelters and harm reduction centers to build solidarity and new systems with people struggling with substance use, housing instability, and mental health challenges.