HEALTH
The ecosocial design process aims to improve health in two ways, by improving the individual health of the participant, and by improving collective health of the neighborhood through environmental change.
Starting with Real Time Health Mapping in 2012, AWED has been creating methodologies and approaches using design and data to effect health outcomes.
The process has focused on design studios with high risk youth in Brownsville Brooklyn since 2014. Brownsville is New York City's hot spot for violence and chronic disease with the highest rates in the city since the neighborhood's construction in the 1880s. Ecosocial practice was situated within Brownsville, and various studios were created as a result. Now, working primarily with Brownsville Community Justice Center (BCJC) and other partners, AWED is creating a health based data ecosystem that measures the effects of real time health outcomes on indivdual participants and their aggregate communities from the inside out.
With Delicious Memories and The Melting Pot Foundation, elders and youth work together to create food and knowledge centered transgenerational spaces of sanctuary in Brownsville. These efforts become diabetes prevention through social and spatial alignment.
The Urban Rhythms Flex Dance studio with Mark Morris Dance Group and BCJC will be testing out real time methodologies in Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 to change the shared psychosocial reality of public spaces in and around Brownsville.
To prevent high school drop out the Brownsville Community Justice Center commissioned AWED to work with a team of youth from Teacher's Preparatory Secondary School to research patterns between stress and family and friend social networks.
Working with a group from Brownsville Academy high school a culturally resonant mindfulness room was designed for mental health. The space was built in 2016.
The Vietnam Local Lab experiments with organizing lab testing in neighborhood gathering places, capitalizing on local talent and re-orienting global capital flows around health care.
Kyoto Urban Design studio with the University of Oregon, Myoshinji Zen Temple, and the City of Kyoto allows an opportunity to experiment in spaces of mental health, healing gardens, mindfulness practice, and application within a diversity of neighborhoods in the city.
Through Matchaparty these methods of health are being applied to a wide range of diverse groups, attempting to address unique urban stresses in the city of New York.
