That's a wrap

May 18, 2016

The 132 pages are printed and bound. Thesis is complete!

Here's a link to the pdf version of my book. My plan is to post a video to my thesis presentation as well.

Design for Social Capital

This blog served as a running log of thoughts, terms and experiments as I pursued my MFA thesis in Transdisciplinary Design program from Parsons.

My thesis is about investigating design's role in fostering human capital in fragmented urban neighborhoods. Particularly, I focused on my own neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where people of different backgrounds – race, length of residence, age, religion, lifestyle, etc – live in the same geographic space.

The main hypothesis of this thesis is that if a neighborhood is entrusted with caring for and engaging with artifacts that are left outside at all hours of the day, then an increase in social capital in the neighborhood will follow.

Social capital is defined by Robert Putnam as "connections among individuals - social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them" (2000).