Elementor #6936
WHO WE ARE
al-ae is a collaborative practice rooted in community, culture, and co-creation. Our guiding principle is to design with and not for. Co-founded by Abdullah Elias and Androniki Lagos, ALAE advances ecosystem development through the integration of participatory design, cultural strategy, and collective care. We work at the intersection of policy, place-making, and public life to build infrastructures that reflect the needs, values, and leadership of communities too often excluded from planning processes. Through a hybrid approach that merges participatory design, art, architecture, and activism, we reimagine how systems and spaces function, centering local knowledge, fostering cultural resilience, and expanding collective agency.
Our work is built through long-term relationships with grassroots organizers, artists, educators, city agencies, and public and private institutions. From revitalizing markets and launching community incubators to designing mobile interventions and hosting public forums, each project is rooted in place and shaped through collaboration.
We ground our projects in research and storytelling, guided by a commitment to cultural stewardship and shared ownership. We create platforms where communities can gather, express, and build futures together, cultivating spaces for belonging, imagination, and joy.
Whether convening cross-sector partners, producing public programming, or supporting cooperative development, we design for impact that is both structural and social. We believe that design is a civic practice, and that ecosystem development is most powerful when led by those most affected.
Through this work, we aim to transform not just projects but possibilities in the spaces where people live, work, gather, and dream.
- WHAT WE DO
- Design + Build
- Operations
- Strategy
- Research + Insights
- Testing + Evaluation
“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.” – Octavia Butler
We support our partners beyond the excitement of ideation and creative strategic processes, into the business of making projects and programs real. ALAE takes a 360 degree view of what it means to launch an initiative – whether it’s a for-profit business, workforce program, community service, cultural celebration, cooperative supply chain, or something else entirely. As a team with hands-on experience that includes restaurants, CPG products, nonprofit program management, craft manufacturing, community biolabs, and so much more, we know the level of detail that enables a great operation. We co-develop systems and tools that not only anticipate but overcome the inevitable stress tests that will test the best of operations.
We approach evaluation as an ongoing process of listening and learning. Grounded in developing human-centered impact frameworks that reflect both research-based and community-based knowledge. Rather than relying only on conventional measures of success, we design systems that also value cultural and personal outcomes defined by the people we work with.
Our design and build work begins with people, their needs, habits, and aspirations, and moves outward to shape the systems and spaces that support them. We design with the same care we build, through conversation meeting people where they are. Rather than attempting to build community we find ways of joining the communities we work with let to ensure they lead and have ownership of what is produced.
