Programs
Since 2009, URBANFRAME has offered college-level social innovation design studios to young people. Cities are living labs that put complexity within reach. Our immersive programs take you into real communities where your fresh perspective becomes the key that unlocks old problems.
"Our discussion made chaos make sense. I still see the thing I always wondered about, but clearly.”
-Joyce, 16 yrs
“We went into some amazing places that felt a little outside my comfort zone, but something shifted - I could literally see the future in front of me.”
- Dillon, 18 yrs.
"I learned more in a week than in a whole semester. It's fun. The real world is not what I expected - it made me trust my curiosity."
- Ayan 19 yrs
Night Systems
The CIC
Tokyo, Japan
18-20 yrs
5/25-5/29
Gap Year Studio
MIT & Online
Cambridge, MA
18-20 yrs
7/2026 - 5/2027
The Invisible
City
Studio
What’s hiding in plain sight?
Beneath the obvious lives a second layer of the city most people never learn to read: where time disappears, where care breaks down, where trust is earned, where workarounds keep life moving.
In the Invisible City Studios, you'll learn a repeatable way of seeing more. We'll leave the classroom and enter real places. You capture what you notice, name what’s shaping it, then turn it into finished work you can show, discuss, and sharpen through critique.
No experience required. A fit for anyone who notices what others walk past and wants to do something serious with that instinct.
Leave with digital portfolio of finished work that demonstrates observation, analysis, and evidence-based reasoning. Completion certificate.
SPRING BREAK STUDIO — CAMBRIDGE, MA
April 20-24, 2026 | The Foundry, Cambridge, MA Ages 17-19
$700 ($650 if paid before March 15)
All fieldwork conducted in public settings with adult supervision
Financial assistance available
All materials provided
Five days in a small city with outsized influence, where street life, art, research, capital, hospitals, and public life collide within a few walkable miles. Cambridge sits beside Kendall Square, a global biotech and innovation cluster shaped by MIT and hundreds of life science and technology organizations.
Work in the streets and thresholds where systems become real: transit platforms, waiting rooms, service counters, campuses, river edges, neighborhood blocks. Track the patterns that determine whether a good idea works in real life: friction, access, time, trust, care, and the workarounds people invent when systems do not meet them.
NIGHT SYSTEMS - TOKYO, JAPAN
May 18-22, 2026 CIC Tokyo, Japan
¥150,000 (¥120,000 if paid before April 30)
All fieldwork conducted in public settings with adult supervision
Financial assistance available
All materials provided
Five nights in Tokyo, when the city switches modes and its systems show their seams. After dark, the pace concentrates around stations, street-level services, and the thin margin between last train urgency and the long overnight. Movement, safety, and access become visible design problems, solved in real time by cues, routines, and dense, well-worn paths.
Tokyo is also a city built to live with risk. Preparedness is not a poster on a wall but a set of everyday habits, supplies, and spatial decisions that shape how neighborhoods behave when normal routines break. Night fieldwork makes that legible because you can see what stays reliable when attention drops and fatigue rises.
Across Shibuya Crossing, Shinjuku Station, neighborhood streets, and convenience stores, you document the repeatable patterns that determine whether good ideas survive in real conditions.
You work alongside an international cohort in guided night walks and short studio sessions. You leave with clear, shareable artifacts that make the city readable: what is happening, what may be driving it, what it is costing, and what should be protected, improved, or tested next.
GAP YEAR STUDIO - MIT/ONLINE
July 2026 - May 2027 MIT, Cambridge + Online
Ages 18-20 | $8,500 (Payment plan and financial assistance available.)
A gap year is a rare opportunity: real freedom, direct exposure to the world, and enough time to find out what holds. It comes in many forms: travel, language immersion, service, internships, independent research, creative pursuits, or some combination. There is no wrong version. They share one common risk: a full year of new experience, without a practice for capturing it, dissolves. What remains are impressions, vivid but disconnected and hard to share. The URBANFRAME gap year studio is built on a single conviction:
The full value of experience is realized when you give it a form others can recognize.
You finish with a body of significant, exhibition-ready work that is distinctly yours, and a new lens for seeing that stays with you.
This is not a travel or placement program.Outside the MIT intensive and scheduled online sessions, students are living their own year and are not under program supervision. It runs alongside whatever your year contains and converts it into finished work with a coherent through-line. Outside the MIT intensive and scheduled online sessions, students are living their own year and are not under program supervision.
Two weeks at MIT, Cambridge, MA
Using the design studios, fabrication technology, and maker spaces of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as our base of operations, you'll begin by moving through the greater Boston area to study what's actually happening where life concentrates: clinics, transit stations, housing offices, classrooms, courtrooms, sidewalks.
You'll document what you find and make finished work from it in a medium you choose: photography, film, writing, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, sound, or product design.
Work is reviewed in studio with your cohort and visiting practitioners. You leave Cambridge with completed pieces, a sharpened eye, and a direction you will develop through the rest of the year.
August–May: Studio from wherever you are
This is the collaborative format found in graduate-level art and design schools: a regular creative rhythm, a consistent and supportive cohort, candid feedback, time for revision, and goals that keep the work flowing and the focus sharp.
Twice a month you bring a finished piece to a three-hour session. You present, you hear responses, and you refine what you’re pursuing. Over time, the sessions give your year a continuous thread of production and keep your thinking sharp through whatever else you’re doing, wherever you’re doing it.
Who this is for
Young people who want to come out of their gap year with a body of work, a defined creative focus, and a way of seeing they didn’t have before. No prior experience in art or design is required. Genuine curiosity and willingness to follow it somewhere specific are required.
Capstone
The year ends with a final publication and an exhibition-format presentation of your work. Students who complete the program are eligible for a letter of recommendation.
Faculty
The program is led by Daniel Hewett, architect and educator, and founder of Urbanframe, a field-based learning studio established in 2009. Visiting practitioners join throughout the year for studio critique and conversation.
Questions?
We hold regular conversations for prospective students, parents, and counselors.
Gap Year Studio
