*The following post is based off notes from a talk I gave at a panel on civic art and design at the 2nd Annual Boston Civic Media Consortium conference on Design, Technology, and Social Impact on June 10th, 2016 at Microsoft Research New England.
CampusNeighbor was designed to reimagine the relationships between between students and residents living around the campus of Syracuse University. The motivation to do this came about In 2010 when I read a Gallup poll showing that peoples love and passion for their community may be a strong predictor of local economic activity. This got me thinking about a university town like Syracuse, where I was living at the time, where the classic divide between students and long term residents was evident. As I learned from my conversations, residents felt a disconnect from a large portion of the population in their community and students felt no connection to spaces and people off campus. With the economic urgency outlined by the Gallup poll in mind, I wondered how we might reimagine the relationship between two groups of people in such a way that there could be more opportunities for positive and productive intersections of daily life.
