Folding chair earrings, Black Aquaman, memes for days—Black people are celebrating the immediate, fubu-style justice meted out in the “Montgomery Brawl.” As Black twitter and insta get busy doing transformative, hilarious, and brilliant culture work, DS4SI co-founder Kenneth Bailey takes a minute to acknowledge the catharsis of Black joy.

Ideas are embedded in social arrangements, which in turn produce effects.

With this simple premise, DS4SI makes the case for arrangements as a rich and overlooked terrain for social justice and world building. Unpacking how ideas like racism and sexism remain sturdy by embedding themselves in everything from physical and social infrastructure to everyday speech and thought habits, this book gives readers the tools to sense, intervene in and imagine new arrangements. Using diverse examples from their work and others, DS4SI offers readers a roadmap for using social interventions to invite the larger public into imagining and creating a more just and vibrant world.

In emergencies like hurricanes and tsunamis, emergency response centers exist to coordinate evacuations or provide services like temporary housing, food, and water. We want to reimagine response centers to take on the real and pressing social emergencies we face today.

On days like today, the headlines stack themselves against me. I get thrown into a particular emotional arc. I am taken up by too familiar a choreography. Something rises in me and that something wants to see a public acknowledgment of what these daily headlines reveal about the daily violence directed at black people.

We think communities are essential infrastructures. Infrastructures can be relational; they can be about improving the ways in which communities work and play together to improve quality of public life. We think new infrastructures can be co-designed, built, and managed by communities.

The juxtaposition between “everyday time” and societal collapse is undoing us. Giving ourselves a season for collective inquiry and meaning-making is so counter-cultural that just by doing it, we will affect social life.

For whites, it is critical to understand how horror is different than terror. As we try to talk across race about the endless police and vigilante killings of Black people, we need to explore both horror and terror, and the important gaps between them.

How do we collectively reckon with what we saw—and didn’t see— during the attempted coup, when we have no arrangements for stepping out of ordinary time?

When attention architects like media outlets and politicians place an intriguing figure in front of us, we need to stop to notice what is being asked of our attention and why. This piece explores figure/ground and what we can learn from artists to blur the lines and grow the frame.

Right now, violent ideas about black people are embedded in every arrangement of American society, and the effect is constant black death. DS4SI uses our IAE framework to imagine change.

We need to understand that when white lives are at risk, we stop everything. And when black lives are at risk, we stop nothing. Read more.

Instead of letting the coronavirus amplify and solidify our impulses to individuate, isolate and hunker down into our daily lives, we are making a call for the opposite.

Ten short pieces from collaborators explore spatial justice with examples ranging from hostile police sirens as a sonic tool for spatial injustice, to personal reflections on struggles for “black space” (and white flight), to calls for “justice scenographics”, community-led urban planning, and more.

In this short paper we situate what we call public-making—the collective creation and activation of public spaces for interaction and belonging—as a radical, joyful tool for spatial justice. What if we used public space for the collective creation of opportunities for interaction, laughter, dialogue, and surprise?

Just as fire drills train us for how to act and what to do in case of a physical emergency, we need drills and steps for how to act when there's a social emergency. (And in case you were wondering, the on-going state-sanctioned violence against Black people IS a social emergency.) We need steps that we are forced to practice, so we have some social version of “stop, drop and roll” ready to go when there’s a social fire. Here are some ideas...

On March 9th, 2013, 16-year old Kimani Gray was shot and killed by two plainclothes NYPD police officers.  Since then, of course, the brutal extent of state sanctioned violence against the black community has given rise to Black Lives Matter and numerous actions and protests around the country. And yet the murders keep coming. Here is a short paper we did after Kimani’s death, using our "Five S" methodology to think through the structures, systems, sensations, scale and symbols that can help us set the problem within the larger national context of Afrophobia, as well as helping us think about new ways to address the state sanctioned violence against black communities.

This paper describes the creation of an energetic, new, third space—one where activists and artists come together with a shared understanding of the powerful possibilities for creative social interventions that can shift “small-c culture” and create change at the scale of the public. It explores how artists’ use of “productive fictions,” “elegant gestures,” humor, and surprise can interrupt social norms, helping people imagine new solutions to complex social problems.

What would happen if there were greater social room for the expression of gender, as well as other elements of our identities? What can we learn from social interventions that create more empathy, like the “Sea of Pink” or the AIDS Quilt?  We believe creating social room can be a transformational social technique, and while it’s not all that we need, it's certainly worth testing as a way of opening up new dialogues and creating the space for new solutions.

Our “5 S’s” include: Structure, System, Scale, Symbol and Sensation. We dig into the “5 S’s” as our first step towards designing effective social interventions.

We think of social interventions as actions taken to reconfigure social habits, unspoken agreements or arrangements that, prior to the intervention, add to the durability and normalcy of a social problem. This early DS4SI piece provides humorous and radical interventionist tips drawn from fields of design, play, philosophy and more.

DS4SI co-founder, Lori Lobenstine, “co-authored” this poem with Judge Timothy J. Wilson after he declared white St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley innocent in the shooting murder of black driver Anthony Lamar Smith. It underscores the dangerous catch-22 of the white carceral/juridical/societal gaze on the black body.

Excessive police violence and its disproportionate targeting of minority communities has existed in the United States since police forces first formed in the colonial period. A personal tragedy for its victims, for the people who love them, and for their broader communities, excessive police violence is also a profound violation of human and civil rights. Most public discourse about excessive police violence focuses, understandably, on the horrors of civilian deaths. In From Enforcers to Guardians, Hannah L. F. Cooper and Mindy Thompson Fullilove approach the issue from a radically different angle: as a public health problem.

Click here to read or download PDF.