Design Sprints

Ongoing

Design Sprints: Building Creative Capacity

In Spring 2025, our Design Sprints program is partnering with New York City’s Department of Small Business Services (SBS) to explore the intersection between arts programming and economic development, with a focus on areas with high storefront vacancy.

Storefront vacancy is a nuanced issue impacting many commercial districts’ quality of life, public realm, and small business engagement. While addressing storefront vacancy requires a long-term strategy for investment and intervention, in the short term, immediate services are needed to address the impact the perception of vacancy has on commercial districts. Design Sprints: Building Creative Capacity will provide community-based organizations with capacity building and design support, including project design and strategic planning, to understand and address storefront vacancy in creative ways.

Learn more about our Spring 2025 cohort and their projects below!

This initiative is supported by the NYC Department of Small Business Services.

As the oldest anti-displacement organization in the United States, Cooper Square Committee works with residents to preserve and develop affordable, environmentally-healthy housing and community and cultural spaces on the Lower East Side. They’re collaborating with artist Delphine Le Goff and graphic designer Scott Kelly to activate their storefront window on East 4th Street and two vacant storefronts located in a Housing Development Fund Corporation (HDFC) cooperative — a type of affordable housing co-op that’s collectively owned and operated by residents. Together, they will highlight the history of HDFCs and the small businesses situated in them, and create a digital map showcasing local businesses.

The Grand Street Business Improvement District (BID) is a nonprofit community development organization creating a vibrant commercial district along Grand Street in Brooklyn through advocacy, beautification, and sanitation efforts. They’re collaborating with branding and digital designers L&L Studio and ReFrame Architecture to transform a large vacant corner storefront in Brooklyn. Their storefront window activation will feature an interactive art project highlighting the East Williamsburg community.

Throughout the sprint, a team of designers provide strategic vision and guidance for both teams. MOS Architects is advising on the cohort’s long-term plans to address storefront vacancy, with graphic design support from American Design Language. Fabricator Pink Sparrow is conducting ongoing feasibility review and cost assessments, while Farzana Gandhi Design Studio is helping the teams prepare public programs and community engagement activities.

Through the sprint and storefront activations, Van Alen Institute and SBS provide the cohort with hands-on guidance, facilitation and relationship-building techniques, and connections to design resources.

In this virtual workshop presented by SBS and Van Alen, community-based development organizations  learned about low-cost, easy-to-use design tools to create and improve their brand identity. They also discovered how design can amplify the impact of their work and how to collaborate with artists to create projects that respond to neighborhood needs.

Speakers:
Diana Araujo, Architect and Preservationist
Rosa Chang, Co-Founder and President, Gotham Park
BD Feliz, Design Strategist
Martha Hall, Illustrator
Scott Kelly, Graphic Designer

This workshop was funded by the New York City Small Business Services’ Organizational Development Avenue NYC grant.