Journal — Buildspace
The Digital Sidewalk framework
A study of Buildspace connects everyday participation with indirect learning across online and physical settings.
The Digital Sidewalk framework examines learning through participation in a community: watching a project develop, asking a question, returning to familiar people, and trying something after seeing someone else attempt it. My 2025 dissertation studied these processes in Buildspace. The subsequent paper with William J. Brown presents the framework in shorter form.
The work brings together Jane Jacobs's account of public life, Gordon Pask's work on interaction, and Mitchell Duneier's sidewalk ethnography. I applied that theoretical perspective to a community whose activity moved between online platforms and physical gatherings.
What I studied
The research combined participant observation across two online seasons and San Francisco events, interviews with three long-term members, digital artifacts, and field notes. Participating in the program let me observe its routines while also experiencing its deadlines and public demonstrations.
Three dimensions organized the analysis:
- Movement: the paths through which participation develops, including movement between watching, questioning, attempting, and sharing.
- Characters: recurring public roles that become recognizable through what people do, such as guiding newcomers or connecting groups.
- Safety: the conditions under which people participate, share developing work, and respond to difficulty.
These dimensions direct attention to observable activity. A researcher can trace a participant's route through a project, identify recurring roles, and examine how others respond when someone asks for help. The study did not reduce those observations to a single community score.
What the framework contributes
The contribution is an organized way to investigate the relationship between a community's environment and the learning that takes place within it. It gives a researcher questions to pursue and evidence to collect across physical and digital settings.
The evidence comes from one community and a qualitative study. It supports a detailed interpretation of Buildspace; broader claims require additional settings and comparison. The Lab's global research protocol describes how that next stage could be approached.
The dissertation and paper are linked below so readers can examine the method and argument beyond this summary.
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