My name is Jeffrey Yoo Warren, and I am an artist, community scientist, illustrator, and researcher in Providence, Rhode Island.

I collaboratively create community science projects which decenter dominant culture in environmental knowledge production. I host participatory projects, run workshops and give talks on cultural making, collaborative practice, community science, and open hardware. I am also a contributor to over 150 open source code projects, many of which I started and several of whose communities I lead. I’m an illustrator as well as a mentor of programs that support diversity, equity, and inclusion in software engineering, and am Lead Code Community Coordinator at Public Lab as part of this work. (more on this coming soon)

In 2023, I became the Library of Congress Innovator in Residence for my ongoing work on Seeing Providence Chinatown and the broader project, Seeing Lost Enclaves: Relational reconstructions of erased historic neighborhoods of color.

I am a member of AS220 Industries and served three terms on the Open Source Hardware Association board since 2014. I have an MS from MIT and a BA in Architecture from Yale University, and spent much of that time working with artist/technologist Natalie Jeremijenko, building robotic dogs.

Public Lab

In 2010, I co-founded Public Lab, a community science network and non-profit dedicated to democratizing science to address environmental issues that affect people. After 10 years as Director of Research, I stepped down at the start of 2020, although I remain involved in Public Lab’s code community (see above).

Work

My work, including collaborations and collaborative designs whose development I led as part of my open source work at Public Lab, has been exhibited at the MIT Museum (2018), Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City (2017), the Queens Museum (2016), the Art Center Nabi in Seoul, Korea (2017), ArtScience Museum in Singapore (2016), Somerset House in London (2016), Centre of Contemporary Culture Barcelona (2015), the Design Museum in London (2014), and the Milan Triennale (2008).

Events

I have led community science workshops and organized events at the Design Studio for Social Intervention’s inPublic (2019) and SERC (2018), Le Janbyr in Almaty, Kazakhstan (2019), AS220 Industries in Providence, Rhode Island (2018-9), the Universidad Católica de Chile in Valdivia (2019), various Public Lab Barnraisings (2011-2019), the Gathering of Open Science Hardware (2018 and 2017), Open Institute in Maderia (2017), the Waag Society in Amsterdam (2014), FAB10 in Barcelona (2015), UNI in Lima (2011), and the Whitney Musuem (2011). I also participate in New Old and Tockwotton Makes, intergenerational making workshops organized by Aisha Jandosova in Providence, RI.

I have given talks and presentations at EXPERIMENTA CDMX - AGUA in Mexico City (2019), Stanford’s Digital Impact initiative (2019), LibrePlanet (2018), the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (2017), MIT ClimateX (2017), FAB10 Barcelona (2015), Mediamatic (Amsterdam, 2013), the Open Hardware Summit (2013) and Ars Electronica’s Accountability Tech Symposium (2012).

Photo by Christopher Villafuerte CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Lead photo by Dakota Lenox photography