Community Co-design Program

AIXHUMAN’s flagship program puts communities at the center of how intelligent technologies are imagined, built, and used in cities.

Based at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, AIXHUMAN connects residents, researchers, humanists, designers, and fabricators through one shared mission: making Physical AI serve healthier communities. Our Community Co-design Program turns that mission into practical work—moving from neighborhood priorities to working prototypes, with residents shaping the decisions throughout.

The city is becoming intelligent. Communities must shape its intelligence.

Sensors, robotics, and automated systems increasingly act in streets, buildings, and infrastructure. Decisions about what these systems measure, whose needs they address, and who controls their data affect everyday life. Yet residents often encounter these technologies only after the important choices have been made.

Our work begins in New York City, with an initial focus on waterfront neighborhoods surrounding the Brooklyn Navy Yard and communities in the South Bronx. Flooding, extreme heat, air quality, limited green space, and unequal access to resources make these places essential settings for community-led experimentation.

The starting point is a local question: What would make this neighborhood more inhabitable, accessible, and resilient—and how should technology contribute?

One year. One community-defined priority. A working prototype.

Our first yearlong pilot will bring residents and the AIXHUMAN team together to define, design, build, and test one Physical AI tool addressing a neighborhood priority.

Listening sessions will establish the problem before a technology is selected. Fabrication workshops and studios will make ideas tangible. A public forum will connect technical experiments with cultural inquiry, allowing people to examine prototypes, question assumptions, and shape the work.

Potential areas include flood sensing, heat, tree canopy, urban biodiversity, and public-space technology. The community will determine the focus.

The pilot will produce a working prototype, documented findings, and a practical co-design playbook that other neighborhoods can adapt.

Residents set the terms.

A Community Steering Group, including youth, will guide which prototypes advance, where they are tested, and how their effects are evaluated. Residents will establish what systems may sense, who can access the data, how findings are shared, and when a system should be switched off or removed.

Community Fellows will work alongside researchers and makers, developing practical skills in design, fabrication, and AI. Youth leadership will help shape both the questions and the experiments.

The humanities belong in the workshop.

Physical AI supplies the capacity to sense and act. Expanded Humanities brings ethics, history, philosophy, art, and cultural inquiry into the decisions that give those capabilities purpose.

Together, they connect technical performance with questions of care, agency, labor, ownership, and public value. Success means a useful tool that residents understand, can question, and have the authority to shape.

One group, shared expertise.

Led by Terreform ONE, AIXHUMAN draws on expertise across NYU Gallatin, Brooklyn Navy Yard, TED Fellows, CIV, Cooper Union, Genspace, and 10XBeta. Our group connects ecological design, robotics, biotechnology, humanities scholarship, civic leadership, and community resilience.

This shared foundation carries ideas from seminar to workshop, from prototype to neighborhood, and from local experience back into research.

A lasting framework for community-led intelligence.

Beyond the pilot, we aim to develop additional neighborhood-designed prototypes, a trained cohort of Community Fellows, and a Physical AI × Expanded Humanities Charter establishing how communities set the terms for intelligent systems.

Our measure of progress: stronger local capacity, healthier environments, and technologies people can understand, govern, repair, and improve.