Vincent Purcell Social Impact Design

I am a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Social Design Fellow with the Center for Social Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. I co-founded a community makerspace and startup incubator called boomspace in East Baltimore, and a social impact studio called boomco. Technology, coffee, and breaking down socio-economic barriers are all in a good days' work. Connect with me: [email protected]

[mypubliclands]

President Obama Designates New National Monuments in Utah and Nevada

Gold Butte and Bears Ears National Monuments protect some of our nation’s most gorgeous landscapes, important cultural sites & wildlife habitat for future generations. Check out the announcement here and learn more about the new designations below:

The 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah protects one of most significant cultural landscapes in the United States, with thousands of archaeological sites and important areas of spiritual significance. Abundant rock art, ancient cliff dwellings, ceremonial kivas, and countless other artifacts provide an extraordinary archaeological and cultural record, all surrounded by a dramatic backdrop of deep sandstone canyons, desert mesas, and forested highlands and the monument’s namesake twin buttes. These lands are sacred to many Native American tribes today, who use the lands for ceremonies, collecting medicinal and edible plants, and gathering materials for crafting baskets and footwear. Their recommendations will ensure management decisions reflect tribal expertise and traditional and historical knowledge.

Gold Butte National Monument covers nearly 300,000 acres of remote and rugged desert landscape in southeastern Nevada, where dramatically chiseled red sandstone, twisting canyons, and tree-clad mountains punctuate desolate stretches of the Mojave Desert. The brightly hued sandstone provides a stunning canvas for the area’s famously beautiful rock art, and the desert provides critical habitat. The area is popular for outdoor recreation, and visitors to the monument can hike to rock art sites, drive the Gold Butte Backcountry Byway to the area’s namesake mining ghost town, hunt desert bighorn sheep, or tour the area’s peaks and canyons on horseback.

View more photos here.

[jacobeesees]

Recent work for the New York Times about geoengineering and environmental policy making. Scary stuff!

Sarah Jacoby Illustration

[codeorg]

Elizabeth Bacon Los Angeles, CA

Ms. Bacon teaches several computer science classes but she isn’t a teacher, exactly. She’s a counselor whose school didn’t offer computer science a few years ago. She proposed the idea for a course and offered to write the curriculum and teach it herself.

[re-workblog-blog]

The tech world is rapidly evolving and it’s hard to keep up! To help you get up to date we’ve made a selection of the best tech articles from this past week that you should be reading:

Intel reveals world’s smallest wireless modem for the Internet of things

“By 2020,...

[gjmueller-deactivated20181226]

Innovation Mindset = Growth + Maker + Team Experiences

What do young people need to know and be able to do be successful? Sure reading, writing, and problem solving are important to just about every family wage job. Content knowledge gives you something to work with, but what else is important for success in life? It turns out there are a bunch of factors that schools seldom talk about, teach, or provide feedback on that are at least as important as academic skills.

[adventuresinlearning]

Great list! good way to think about it!

[jadedoto]

Bracelet Project_Made with Code

You code it. A 3D printer prints it. You flaunt it.

[jadedoto]

A nonprofit in Queens taught people to write iPhone apps — and their incomes jumped from $15k to $72k

The first students of the Access Code program in New York saw their incomes go from $15,000 to just over $72,000 six months after graduation.

[theatlantic]

Africa’s Tech Edge

How the continent’s many obstacles, from widespread poverty to failed states, allowed African entrepreneurs to beat the West at reinventing money for the mobile age

Read more. [Image: Mike McQuade]

[theatlantic]

What the Left and Right Both Get Wrong About the Moynihan Report

The 1965 document is a touchstone in the debate over black culture and the War on Poverty. The author’s call for full employment and a welfare state, however, is mostly forgotten.

Read more. [Image: Library of Congress]

[theatlantic]

Does Traditional College Debate Reinforce White Privilege?

Minority participants aren’t just debating resolutions—they’re challenging the terms of the debate itself.

Read more. [Image: Donna McWilliam/AP Photo]

[statedept]

STEMatState: Saving Lives through Advanced Engineering

Did you know that the Department of State uses 3-D printing technology to create models of landmines and military ordnance to train demining technicians on how to safely clear explosive remnants of war in post-conflict countries around the world?

Learn more about the Department of State’s efforts in STEM on DipNote and at www.state.gov/stem.

[jadedoto]

Video: 3D Printing Industry Veteran Terry Wohlers Interview - 3DPI.TV

The keynote speaker at the Inside 3D Printing Berlin event recently was industry veteran Terry Wohlers.

If 3d printing were to capture only two percent of the world’s manufacturing economy, he pointed out, it will generate over $210 billion annually.

“That’s where we think it’s going,” he said.

(via Maker Pro Newsletter)

[jadedoto]

This morning, Katherine LePage, a local architect friend who also happens to teach a digital drawing course here at MICA invited me in to take over her class. I gave the usual pitch about digital fabrication, thesis work, and some of the entrepreneurial opportunities it affords people today.

Near the end of the class we even talked a bit about intellectual property, futuristic principles like voxels, and the ethics of unregulated ephemeral physical objects (including the Liberator pistol).

But we spent most of the class creating 3D scans of everyone. So now I have a bank of 14 students’ scans. The class will be going into the digital fabrication studio in a week or so to meet with Ryan Hoover. The goal is then the students will take the models of themselves that we created today, clean them up, and print themselves in 3D! I look forward to seeing where the project goes.

[jadedoto]

Tonight, my VC class at University of Baltimore went to listen to a panel on the implications of new policies on crowdfunding. The panelists sprinkled in some excellent advice on entrepreneurship and business plans. Definitely a good talk to listen to. Here's a bootleg recording:

https://soundcloud.com/vincent-purcell/crowd-funding-at-university-of

[jadedoto]

Issue 3 of the McElderry Park Star distributed today. The team was lean, but strong! Be sure to grab a copy it's a keeper. (at Amazing Grace Lutheran Church)

[newsweekscience]

When I heard that my 21-year-old son, a student at Harvard, had been stopped by New York City police on more than one occasion during the brief summer he spent as a Wall Street intern, I was angry.

On one occasion, while wearing his best business suit, he was forced to lie face-down on a filthy sidewalk because—well, let’s be honest about it, because of the color of his skin. As an attorney and a college professor who teaches criminal justice classes, I knew that his constitutional rights had been violated.

As a parent, I feared for his safety at the hands of the police—a fear that I feel every single day, whether he is in New York or elsewhere.

Moreover, as the white father of an African-American son, I am keenly aware that I never face the suspicion and indignities that my son continuously confronts. In fact, all of the men among my African-American in-laws—and I literally mean every single one of them—can tell multiple stories of unjustified investigatory police stops of the sort that not a single one of my white male relatives has ever experienced.

What I Learned About Stop-and-Frisk From Watching My Black Son - The Atlantic

[jadedoto]

BOOM! Progress Meeting with Dave

This morning, I met up with Dave Harris at the Center for Grace-Full Living in McElderry Park. We recapped the last BOOM! workshop and talked about possibilities moving forward. 

Turns out that Sinclair is really interested in using the 3D printing stuff to make fashion objects. I'll be getting in contact with him soon to figure out that business opportunity--but he's excited about making belt buckles or other objects to sell. 

Dave and I talked about how to actually monetize the venture. He's got a relationship with some of the retailers on Monument Street, and we'll talk about possibly setting up shop within a few of the shops. We'd cut a percent of the proceeds with them, and take a cut for us. It'd be a really cool little test bed for scaling--we could provide some products in plastic prints, but also have an on-demand service through Shapeways for more advanced materials. 

We discussed having a catalog of available items that we could market to the retailers such as custom pins using the store logo, jewlery, etc. We talked about selling "designer" items like custom printed lampshades or CNC milled furniture even. This would all work really well if we scaled to a neighborhood-level manufacturing facility.

To test that out, I proposed the idea of doing pop-up shops on the weekend. We'd use the BOOM! workshops to train several neighborhood residents on 3D modeling and the basics of fabrication and create local "experts" that then would have a stand that designed on-demand and printed objects, say, one Saturday a month. I think that'd be really cool. It'd be similar to the popup shop that opened in Canton over the holidays. We could also offer the Shapeways service so that we'd be able to do full-color models, or in various materials.

We talked about later on doing a fundraising dinner to raise money from investors to help cover capital costs associated with startup, and the necessity for a legal entity (LLC or the like) moving forward. Dave mentioned that "Everything you do is a business-- you have to make a living and feed your family... People often forget that even a Church is a business." He was refreshingly adamant about the fact that we're in the business of helping people--and we need to make a profit doing it.

We're doing the next workshop on customizing phone cases on April 5th from 12pm-3pm at MICA PLACE. I'm hoping to get the Frozen Lava team from DHF to come help teach or at least be a guest lecturer. We'll see.

We ended the conversation on the real stories of the community. I heard about some really messed up situations some of the workshop participants are navigating. 

Venture capital class tonight was interesting. JC Weiss and I chatted about what it is I'm doing in his class and about social enterprises briefly afterwards. I should hit that connection up soon. Dropped by the AIA lecture, said hello to Mindy Fullenlove, embarrassed Jonathan in front of her, and said hello to Marisela Gomez. Her reaction to me telling her book was awesome and a great introduction to my work was, "you read the whole thing? It's kind of dense."

But that's okay. After my short pitch (that I didn't really intend to do), she approved of what we're doing with BOOM!. That's encouraging :)

Rode the 13 bus home again, since Jonathan is using the car to shuffle people around. Now to prepare for a thesis checkin tomorrow and the Ignite Baltimore 14 talk!