Need to think beyond the expected, the possible, the upright? Intervention Inspiration Challenge is a simple tool to widen your ideas about your intervention.

We promise it will get you to some bad ideas, some hilarious ones, and just beyond that—the one that might really pop!

How does the shape of our questions organize our action?

We invite you to jot down some questions that are active for you right now—your working questions. These could be small or large, individual or collective, practical or spiritual. It’s best if they are questions that have something at stake or carry a charge.

What happens when we treat questions the way we treat art materials? Cut, fold, weave, stitch, weld them? Split, soak, or soften them?

How would you describe the social problem you want to solve or the situation you want to intervene in?

Our descriptions of a problem are grounded in our habits. Playing with other ways of describing a problem helps us to practice framing the problem large enough to include ourselves.

Sometimes how we diagram out a problem can reveal different ways to see and describe a problem. What if we switched up the diagram? What changes if our diagram is simple or complex? Familiar or strange?

The challenge of repurposing a strange diagram to explain a system that you think you are familiar with can help you see new aspects of power, flow, and relationship.

One of the ways to get more “fluent” with discerning ideas, arrangements, and effects is to practice mapping them onto articles, photos, or videos. Here are some to start with, but you can also try a daily newspaper, youtube videos, or even your organization logo or mission statement if you work for a nonprofit.

DS4SI works with artists to find new ways of exploring and exposing the nuances of culture—working with their skills in the realms of the symbolic, the unspoken and the possible. By doing so, we aim for a better understanding of how people, communities, and cultures make and act upon collective meaning. Understanding these aspects of social life makes it possible to work within them as a points of leverage for social change. This paper explores three cultural tactics we've found effective in our work.

Terrain research is a way to observe the space where you want to intervene. Physically go to the space and practice close observation. This activity offers some questions for you and your team as you spend time in your chosen space.

Social Emergency Response Centers (SERCs) are an imagined arrangement, a DIY public infrastructure that any community can use when they need it. They are co-created with activists, artists and community members alike. are an imagined arrangement, a DIY public infrastructure that any community can use when they need it. They are co-created with activists, artists and community members alike.

Public Kitchen is a “productive fiction” that invites community residents to experience a not-yet-existing public infrastructure—or arrangement, if you would—that could make their daily lives more vibrant, affordable, tasty and healthy.

Close reading is the practice of continually asking ourselves and one another: What is it you’re seeing, that I can also see, that has you draw that conclusion? Or that has you make that interpretation?

The slider tool is useful in both the specification and iteration phases of designing an intervention. It borrows from digital photo editing programs where sliders are used to let you see changes before committing to them. A slider for saturation lets you see how an image would appear with heightened color or with almost no color, for instance.

Understanding the nuances of the people who we want to engage with our interventions is really helpful as we ideate and specify. This tool assumes that you are familiar with folks who would use your intervention--whether they are people who make up your school or youth program, the neighbors you see all the time, etc.

Here's a fun challenge from DS4SI's early days, particularly good for using humor to help us critique our ideas without being too closely attached to them. "Perfectly Awful" invites you to picture some of the worst ways you could go about solving the problem you're addressing.

In many of our towns and cities, the mall is functioning as more than just a mall. It's a teen center, a walking track, a people watching place, a cooling station... the list goes on. In fact, the mall is playing roles that might be better played by other kinds of spaces- public spaces.

Every year, there’s always a new sports season. These seasonal sports shape the experience of our town, city, or place. One way these events change our experience of a place is through the arrival of that particular sport's fandom. What are the sports events that affect life where you live?

This is a great exercise to help you and your collaborators to talk about spaces and to look at spaces in new ways. It works equally well across scale, from a school campus to a city or town.

This paper shares how Public Kitchen and Dance Court use scenography (the practice of crafting environments or atmospheres) to give participants a glimpse into world-building, by inviting them to improvise and co-create temporary spaces where a more vibrant and just world already exists.

Planning is great when you have a working solution that you need to execute: a business plan, an annual event, a strategic plan, meeting agenda, wedding, travel, etc. Unfortunately, we often slide into planning when we really need to be designing. Design is both problem solving and world building. Design when you are solving a complex problem, when you are trying to imagine a new arrangement, and/or you notice that you’re cobbling together pre-existing solutions, etc.

Our “5 S’s” include: Structure, System, Scale, Symbol and Sensation. The "5 S's" can help us fully explore the terrain we’re working in before we begin selecting our approach. Coming back to them later can remind us if we fall into habits of just using some of them. When we fail to think across all five, we can end up intervening at the wrong scale or with a symbol that doesn’t resonate, etc.

“Let’s Flip It” is a communication system developed by and for young people most affected by social violence in Boston. Youth interns at DS4SI’s Youth Activism Design Institute (YADI) identified how logos on sports caps were being used to communicate membership in turf based gangs, crews and cliques. This example of participatory action research and design led to our “Let’s Flip It” campaign, YADI’s longest lasting youth-led campaign against horizontal violence.