Collaboration

I work with brilliant people—especially the team at Happy Cities—to build joyful communities everywhere.

Co-designing happier cities

My team at Happy Cities uses the science of wellbeing to create healthier, happier and more inclusive communities. Our interdisciplinary group of urban planners, architects, landscape designers, and engagement specialists helps people from Denver to Dubai harness lessons from psychology and public health in order to design places that work better for everyone.

Contact Happy Cities

Photo credit: Cornerstone Architects

Turning home into a friendship machine

I also work on housing innovations that nurture community and connection. I’m a member of Little Mountain Cohousing, a group of individuals who financed, designed and built our own vertical village in Vancouver. I’m also proud to have collaborated on Our Urban Village, which poured lessons from Happy City into design for the world’s first “cohousing lite” community.

Participatory experiments: for good

I enjoy translating lessons from psychology into public experiments that give people a visceral understanding of the science. Working with the BMW Guggenheim Lab, I turned an empty lot in New York City into a machine for producing the hormone, oxytocin, through human touch. Working with neuroscientist Colin Ellard, we created a new way to test the emotional effects that public space designs have on people. For a primer on what I call urban experimentalism, check out this post.

My collaborative work is based on the premise that almost all people are good, almost all of the time. How can we unlock human kindness? It’s easier than you might think. I realized this when I created Home for the Games, a charity that matched homeowners with visitors during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver—and funneled the revenues to charities fighting homelessness.

If you have social or design challenges you want to solve in your community, or if you’d like to experiment together, let’s talk!