I was invited by the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation to be one of seven international peace fellows to spend a month in Taiwan, discussing and sharing ideas about peace, democracy, design, and shared spaces for coexistence. The fellowship focused on the topic of designing digital and physical public spaces for social cohesion, inclusion, and democratic resilience.

Our activities included giving workshops, lectures, and media interviews; participating in closed-door dialogues, conference talks, and site visits; and meeting with activists, academics, and politicians. We spent significant time examining the specificities of the Taiwan context and discussing learnings from other regions. Two of the key moments in the fellowship were spending three days on Kinmen Island, Taiwan’s “frontline” with China, and participating in the Taipei International Peace Forum.

In the final week of the fellowship, I embarked on an artistic sound research project of shared urban spaces. For this, I walked across Taipei in long stretches over several evenings, collecting sound and visual observations. Because of the heat, it was necessary to change my research plan to take place late at night instead of during the day. This ended up revealing a whole new and sonically interesting story about how urban spaces in Taipei are used and shared at night.

My article in Taiwan Insight: “Good friction: A design principle for positive peace”.