“Grow a community around your work”: Alex Gilliam, Department of Making + Doing

For Alex Gilliam, the work he does with his youth design outfit Public Workshop is not a fly-by-night affair.

“A lot of the language around design thinking and public service at the moment has to do with parachuting into a situation for two or three days and then leaving,” Gilliam said to Architect Magazine. “That’s not how we work.”

In the interview, Gilliam, whose organization is one of four partners at the Science Center’s Department of Making + Doing makerspace, makes a case for building a community around your work. It also calls to mind the fact that Gilliam chose to settle down and build Public Workshop in Philadelphia, after doing similar youth design work all around the country.

Read the whole Architect piece here.