MSDUE Class 2014–

Co-founder of Designing the WE – New York City, NY, USA.

Braden is the co-founder of Designing the WE, a social impact design studio. This studio’s work with diverse communities around equitable and innovative projects connects to a larger ecosystem of social change. These projects include an urban farm as a tool of neighborhood design and development in Trenton, NJ, and Undesign the Redline, an exhibition and curriculum addressing the racism deliberately designed into cities which remains to this day. They have been also working with the CUNY Community Environmental Law Clinic, One Worker One Vote, the North American Representative for Mondragon Cooperatives, and The New School Parsons to create curricula and a Living Lab for the advancement of cooperatives and cooperating ecosystems.

Braden writes: “Our work sits at the intersection of many disciplines and often contesting forces. We learned how to grapple with that at the MSDUE program. The future is only growing more complex, particularly in the areas of sustainable urban systems and community-driven economic development. There are few practitioners who can broker these interests that traditionally sit in silos but can come together in ways that are transformative for communities.”

His advice for incoming Urban@Parsons students is to see themselves as practitioners from the start: “Don’t isolate yourself to a classroom, the city is a better teacher and collaborator. Go out. See Parsons as a launching pad. It’s a great a platform to do your work, not just to think about doing it […] Being a Parsons alumni means knowing how to take your ideas from school to the street.”