DESIS Lab works with faculty and students, in collaboration with community organizations, policymakers, and philanthropies, on research projects that move beyond transactional client relationships, emphasizing shared learning, fostering solidarity, and decentralizing authorship.
Launched in 2009 with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, this initiative investigates ways design can be used to amplify community-led approaches to sustainable living in New York City. Visit the Amplifying Creative Communities website for more information.
Developed in collaboration with the Magnum Foundation and FICA, this initiative is a fellowship and exhibition platform that brings together photographers and grassroots organizations to document alternative approaches to housing and property in Latin America. Through collaborative image making and storytelling, it highlights how communities are already constructing dignified ways of living despite the operations of extractive systems and structural inequality. Rather than presenting these efforts as isolated cases, it positions them as collective practices of resistance and imagination. The resulting works—both documentary and propositional—offer stories, images, and perspectives that expand the way we understand home, land, and belonging while pointing toward futures grounded in solidarity, dignity, and justice.
Launched in 2011 with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, this multi-project initiative investigates the role design can play in building bridges between government and people, allowing for socially innovative methods of providing services for the public good. Visit the Public and Collaborative website for more information.
Launched in 2014 with the support of Citi Community Development, Designing for Financial Empowerment is a cross-sector initiative to explore ways service design can be used to make public-sector financial empowerment services more effective and accessible.
Visit the Designing for Financial Empowerment website for more information.
Service designers in solidarity with service workers: a deck honoring service workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Visit the Workers Tarot website for more information.
Launched in 2021 with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this journey map was developed in collaboration with the Digital Equity Lab and Community Tech NY. The map is an exploration of collaborative and participatory processes designed to create community-owned Internet infrastructure.
Visit the Community Tech NY website for more information.
Launched in 2025 through a collaboration with faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Life in the Faultline is a transdisciplinary platform that brings together researchers, practitioners, communities, and institutions to examine the layered social, ecological, and cultural conditions of places shaped by rupture and instability, whether caused by environmental, infrastructural, or political forces.
Visit the Life in the Faultline website for more information.
Developed with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Justice Initiatives Toolkit introduces a series of prompts for reflection revealed through ethnographic research conducted at the Brooklyn Public Library. It serves as a resource for library workers, offering quotes, stories, and design principles to guide the reentry process at the branches. Rather than providing instructions and templates, the toolkit is self-reflective, mirroring the spirit of the library and the workers involved in justice-related services as revealed by our research.
Parsons DESIS Lab
Eduardo Staszowski, Director
79 Fifth Avenue, 16th floor, room 1628
New York, NY 10003
staszowe@newschool.edu
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