Neighbor Gap Bridge (NGB) advances ethical, adaptive learning by creating experimental spaces where emerging technologies, institutions, and practices can be examined, tested, and reconfigured before they become fixed or irreversible. NGB operates through experiments:
Otis College Courseware – AI PLAY Creative Action/ 300F
The AI PLAY course empowers students to explore AI as a cultural, ethical, and creative force, not just a tool. In the Neighbor Gap Bridge Lab, students prototype AI-driven innovations—from sustainable fashion and post-AI vehicle design to autonomous learning bots and multi-generational ethics GPTs—while centering human values, agency, and iterative experimentation. Faculty and visiting professionals provide mentorship and workshops, ensuring deep ethical and technical engagement. AI is encouraged when cited but never required, giving students freedom to experiment responsibly. The lab employs lightweight reflective instruments to track shifts in students’ beliefs about agency, creativity, and authorship in relation to AI over time.This approach positions the course at the forefront of integrating creativity, ethics, and technology in higher education.
A Cognitive Home, Displaced: Minor Teaching Gestures in Conditions of Algorithmic Solastalgia (Manuscript under review)
As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in educational environments, it reshapes not only how students produce work, but how they experience thinking, authorship, and knowledge itself. The paper introduces algorithmic solastalgia to describe a condition of cognitive and epistemic displacement produced by AI systems—an unease marked by disorientation alongside a longing for coherence, embodiment, and agency.
Between Storytelling, Theory and System: A Dialogic Experiment in AI and Ethical Inquiry (Workshop / Stockholm University · August 21, 2026)
A live, participatory experiment in ethical inquiry using a custom-built “Ethical NGB GPT.” Drawing on children’s moral fables and classical philosophy, the workshop creates an open, dialogic space to explore questions of authorship, responsibility, bias, and automation. Inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, ethics is approached not as a fixed principle, but as a shared, evolving practice.
Post Wildfire Soil Restoration, Emotional Ecology and Repair Signaling (May 2026)
What if post fire soil holds a molecular archive of both disturbance and hope and we could build biological instruments that simultaneously repair the soil and signal the repair process in a sensory way? Developed in the MIT Interdisciplinary Synthetic Biology course “How to Grow (Almost) Anything” this on going project imagines four unrelated “neighboring” genetic circuits “bridging” to produce a practical and poetic response to the 2025 Pacific Palisades Wildfires.
NGB: A Care-Centered Algorithmic Literacy in Design Education
(Manuscript under review)
As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in educational environments, this paper argues for a shift from tool-based approaches to care-centered forms of algorithmic literacy. Drawing on ethics of care and participatory design, it examines how learning environments can be structured to support attention, relationality, and shared responsibility in conditions shaped by AI systems. Rather than prioritizing efficiency or optimization, the paper positions care as a critical orientation for engaging emerging technologies in education.
RED: A Research Training Artifact for Divergent Inquiry
Rather than beginning with established topics or research questions, the presentation employs color as a generative constraint designed to disrupt familiar pathways and engineer novelty at the outset of research formation. Moving across biology, politics, media, culture, and ethics, the artifact invites divergent associations that resist premature categorization.
Grounded in the belief that if students enter research through familiar categories, they reproduce familiar knowledge, the project uses disorientation as a productive epistemic moment—particularly for high-achieving students trained in right-answer paradigms. The artifact functions both as a tool for expanding possible research trajectories and as a training intervention that supports pluralistic, design-based approaches to inquiry aligned with contemporary models of researcher preparation.
Limit No Limit –Paris Design Research Conference
Neighbor Gap Bridge (NGB) an experimental research and pedagogical framework presented at Limit No Limit (Sorbonne, 2024) that examines how learning and creativity operate under conditions of acceleration, crisis, and systemic instability. The project proposes an alternative pedagogical model grounded in liminality, non-instrumental practices, and multi-generational studio inquiry, prioritizing sense-making over solutionism. Drawing from urban studies, design education, and AI literacy, the work reframes learning as a living inquiry that supports human agency and ethical engagement with complex systems.