Umbrella Project

Ongoing

Design Sprints

“Design is powerful. Let’s use it for good. Let’s use it to be inclusive. Let’s use it to empower communities to make decisions about our own built environment.”
— Yin Kong, Executive Director, Think!Chinatown and Design Sprints partner

Design Sprints is Van Alen Institute’s newest community-led design program. Over eight weeks, a five-team cohort comprising community leaders and design professionals collaborate on short-term solutions and tools to meet immediate neighborhood needs.

Design Sprints follows the lead of people already working towards equity and justice in their neighborhoods. Community partners identify an immediate, pressing challenge facing their area, and Van Alen shapes multidisciplinary design teams uniquely suited to those challenges. We facilitate these collaborations through end-to-end project management and provide each team with $5000 in seed funding to implement their plans.

Why a sprint? Time-bound projects — with an attainable “definition of done” and rapid learning — help build trust between people who are often siloed from each other. Each challenge also feeds into neighborhood-scale efforts led by our community partners, and work completed through Design Sprints supports their long-term goals.