What If We Got Creative About Ordinary Things?

Teaching Public Mechanics was fun this past semester, because we got to really look at problems and scope them. I've decided this October during Portland Design Month to organize a participatory design event called the Portland Futures Bureau .

As a designer working in technology, who studies public finance, I tend to think more creatively about how we can deploy invention to bureaucractic problems. We routinely invent financing tools for projects we care about; tax increment financing districts, urban renewal areas, business improvement districts, local option levies, special districts, authorities, public-private partnerships.

What does it look like to be inventive about civic imagination and public capacity, the same ways we purport to care about economic investment?

The Moda Center debate and how quickly legislative forces decided that a professional basketball was worth staying up late to creatively finance solutions for, while lots of things that impact normal people's lives are pushed to another day. Even if there complicated, legitimate reasons for crafting perfect solutions when "okay" ones would have wide impact, these sorts of bets do not get communicated well to every day people.

Here in Portland, there's still no local sanitation bureau, large swaths of East Portland still don't have sidewalks, activity fees leave thousands of public school kids excluded from school music & sports, and public assets.

The format of Portland Futures Bureau is still being determined, but I anticipate a participatory, hands-on event that introduces the concepts of Public Mechanics, stays tangible, asks what we can do tomorrow and next year, and captures some of the civic imagination that I think we've lost as our attention has been pulled away from our own communities.

More to come soon, but I hope you'll join us in October during Design Month! Updates will be online at pdxfutures.org.