At the first North American 24 Hour Inclusive Design Challenge, the winning idea transforms fire hydrants into street furniture that make city streets more manageable for everyone.
On November 17, 2010, The Institute for Human Centered Design and the Royal College of Art's Helen Hamlyn Centre hosted the first 24 Hour Inclusive Design Challenge in North America. Five multi-disciplinary design teams were matched with a “design partner“ (person with disability) and given the task of navigating between a subway station and the Fanueil Hall Rotunda.
What do you get when you cross a slot machine with a savings bond? A new kind of gambling that replaces short-term harm with long-term benefit for the players.
Worth While Gaming is a new kind of gambling system that replaces the "house" with a long-term saving account (similar to a CD) that holds money that is "lost" by a customer for a set period of time and then returns it to them. This system replaces the short-term harm of traditional gambling with long-term benefit.Read more
How do you plan an urban area so that residents share the positives and negatives of new developments? The NIMBY Game is a tool that can be used by stakeholders to builds skills and develop strategies that lead to better outcomes for everyone.
The NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) Game is board game that challenges players to plan a city in such a way that the quality of life for all players is maximized. Players are forced to make difficult decisions and compromises in order to place a range of urban elements — parks, factories, a casino, a convention center — so that they do not disproportionately affect any one neighborhood. By virtue of the geography of the board game and core objective of the game, the fate of the players is bound together so that self-interest must be balanced by the common good in order for the game to be won.Read more
A simple action and a decentralized organizing model brings 5,000 people from 47 states to hijack Bush's inaugural parade. SNL's Weekend Update and The Onion provide coverage. (Also: the BBC, CNN, and newspapers on every continent except Antarctica.)
A 30-year-old art project in a subway station is turned into a tool that reveals hundreds of perspectives on transportation, development, and a changing city.
Twenty-five years ago a new subway stop opened in Somerville, MA. Today, many point to the Davis Square T stop as a major cause of the gentrification of the surrounding neighborhood. As plans are being made to add new stops in Somerville in the next few years, we wanted to drive a conversation about public transportation, artists, and gentrification that included the voices of people who are often left out of urban planning processes, with the ultimate goal of using the experiences of past residents to help current residents create a public transit plan. Read more
What's the best way to get two countries whose leaders have demonized each other to engage in diplomacy? Start with average citizens. By setting up direct phone links and online tools, we're giving Americans and Iranians the chance to talk directly to each other.
Direct citizen diplomacy
In 2006, the Action Mill began a campaign to encourage direct communication between average Americans and Iranians. Beyond geographic distance, communication between our two countries has been severely limited since the 1979 revolution. We worked with Iranian bloggers to design a campaign that would allow average citizens to do what our leaders had failed to do—engage in meaningful dialogue.
The Enough Fear campaign began holding a series of events in public spaces in the US where people are invited to use iconic, old-fashioned red phones to talk directly to volunteers we recruited in Iran. Read more
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Twenty-five years ago a new subway stop opened in Somerville, MA. Today, many point to the Davis Square T stop as a major cause of the gentrification of the surrounding neighborhood. As plans are being made to add new stops in Somerville in the next few years, we wanted to drive a conversation about public transportation, artists, and gentrification that included the voices of people who are often left out of urban planning processes, with the ultimate goal of using the experiences of past residents to help current residents create a public transit plan. 
In 2006, the Action Mill began a campaign to encourage direct communication between average Americans and Iranians. Beyond geographic distance, communication between our two countries has been severely limited since the 1979 revolution. We worked with Iranian bloggers to design a campaign that would allow average citizens to do what our leaders had failed to do—engage in meaningful dialogue.
