Antidote Labs Collaborators

April 10, 2020

By: Mohini and Ben

We have had an incredible response from our friends about the launch of Antidote Labs. When we launched, we expected that maybe one or two people would respond wanting to collaborate, but instead we had many people who are interested in working together on projects big and small! Based on the conversations we've had so far, we are laying the groundwork for a number of collaborations. We wanted to keep a record of them, and share our progress along the way.

Herd Politics | Organizations & Cooperation Game

A long time friend and game designer reached our to us about an idea she had about building coalitions and running community organizations. How might we model organizational mutual aid networks between progressive non profits without relying on resource scarcity? How can we make the messy business of community building and running an organization more accessible through play?

Board games often afford capitalist models of the world. It's easy to count money, wooden cubes, or other game pieces while attempting to collect the most. It's also easy to have a winner and losers, as it makes a familiar play experience without challenging our competitive urges.

While we enjoy classic board games, we also recognize that they perpetuate a simplistic fiction of what the world is like. Those mechanics don't really fit with the experience of running a non-profit or community organization, so we are looking at role playing and storytelling games for inspiration.

We're attempting to create a game where we model running organizations that aren't a capitalist squabble for points, but rather a conversation about possible mutual aid structures that are possible when we work together.

Planting Box | A Game About Setting up Your First Garden

A friend who's worked in community gardens for years has a rooftop garden composed of wooden crates in Hell's Kitchen, and her organization would like to spread around these boxes to folks during the quarantine to introduce urban gardening.

Most of us don't have the horticultural knowledge to help our houseplants survive the winter, let alone know what plants might be grouped together beneficially in ways that might feed us.

When our own budding passion for indoor gardening met our collaborator's distributed community garden project, we all honed in on the need for some playful gardening education.

It's early days, but we're envisioning a tile-laying game that would help new gardeners understand soil types, fertilizers, seasonal seeds, sunlight, and watering techniques to demonstrate efficient planting methods for urban box gardens.

We envision building out this game to help gardeners plan out their box before planting, understand what works best for their homes, and also learn the basics on how to care for each type of plant.

Trickle Down, Evaporate | Coronavirus Relief Bill (CARES Act)

US lawmakers passed the CARES act to help stimulate the economy and give folks money in this time of crises. The 2 trillion dollar (that's this many zeroes: 000,000,000,000) amount is being distributed to all sorts of causes all across the country. The problem with the act is while it gives money to some good causes, it also gives a lot of money to large corporations. We are interested in visualizing where the cash flow is going in a short interactive piece that we'll stick on the labs site as soon as we are finished with a prototype.

Articles and Discussions

We're working with a few friends on some articles and discussions coming up to build on implications of the pandemic. We have many friends who are fantastic writers, artists, and designers, and we're looking forward to collaborating with them. At the moment, we're focusing on how the pandemic has affected mission driven organizations, the design industry, and our habits of making and imagining. There are many more to come!

While all of these projects are in the early stages of development, we'll be posting updates on this site as we build them out more and more. We're lucky to have so many folks who would like to collaborate with us already, but we would love to have more!

Please be in touch if you have any ideas about these or other topics you feel Antidote can contribute positively towards.