Art & Design – Russell Pinkston

The Social Design Toolkit

This collaborative toolkit introduces a new participatory design thinking workflow that includes a collection of crowd-sourced method cards. The project is organized in a way that fosters discussion, enabling reciprocal learning between designers and stakeholders and increasing cultural diversity in the design process.

Click here to view the project in full.
(NOTE: This project is archived. Some links and functionality may be broken!)

Augmented History

The Augmented History project investigates the forgotten history of Reynolds Coliseum as a major cultural center for the city of Raleigh, NC and seeks to preserve this cultural history through the use of emerging technology in Augmented Reality.

Neighbor to Neighbor

As a joint project between North Carolina State University and IBM, I collaborated with a team of designers to develop solutions for a local nonprofit (Neighbor to Neighbor) working with at-risk youth in the Raleigh area.

The Local Shift

All across the US, from small towns to big cities, retail chains are taking over. When you spend money at Target, Walmart, or Amazon, where does your money go? This ethnographic study of the open-air vendors at North Carolina’s State Flea Market addresses the discrepancies between shopping at small-scale local marketplaces versus large retail outlets and what we can do to keep our local economies thriving.

Decoding Wikipedia

Who creates and edits Wikipedia? Who views it? And, what does this tell us about the context of the information we so often take for granted? The following graphics bring to life different aspects of the data behind Wikipedia’s entry for “Imperialism,” so that we might be able to read the story between the lines.

The United States of Diaspora

This infographic is part of a project to both investigate the causes of immigration to the United States, and to better understand the people who choose to come here.

Urban Segregation & Income Inequality – Raleigh, NC

This interactive visualization, coded using Processing, attempts to uncover some of the hidden patterns of segregation in the neighborhoods that make up Raleigh, NC. Through it, we can see just how divided our community remains and the correlating patterns of income inequality that haunt these unofficial enclaves.

“Separate Is Not Equal”

The history of segregation and inequality in the United States did not end in the civil rights era. This short documentary of historical photographs features the voice of Leslie Odom Jr., reading “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written in 1963 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Music by Sweet Honey in the Rock — “Eyes on the Prize (Hold On).”