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 supports community leaders and interdisciplinary designers as they transform New York City’s underutilized spaces into vibrant public assets. Launched in 2024, Design Sprints has mobilized 60 community leaders who serve 600,000+ New Yorkers. Through design training, technical assistance, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, Design Sprints equips these leaders with resources to create impactful, community-led public space projects.

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 seed funding to implement their plans. In addition to public space activations that reflect local priorities, community partners come away with the experience to design and implement future public space projects, and lasting relationships with designers and city agencies.

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.