Brett Snyder has built a portfolio of work in design that invites viewers to take an active part
Brett Snyder is always finding new ways to invite people into his work as a designer. The professor and chair of the MFA program in design at UC Davis is both a teacher and an active practitioner whose work helps to reimagine spaces people know intimately while also collaboratively discovering what’s possible.
Snyder’s work spans creating concepts for large-scale public projects designed to mitigate climate change as well as more speculative work on how to build better connections across UC campuses. He has a forthcoming book that illustrates the potential climate change impacts to 50 sites across California with the help of augmented reality. In all his work, Snyder includes broad participation and multiple points of view.
“I think systemically about how so many things are related, and, because I have a background both as a graphic designer and architect, I try to see outside the specificity of the individual fields,” said Snyder. “I would also say that so much of the ideas come from speaking to different communities.”
The community tells the story
Snyder collaborates widely, both on and off campus. He partnered with his colleague Beth Ferguson, an associate professor of design, Brett Milligan, an associate professor in human ecology, and N. Claire Napawan, a professor in the Department of Human Ecology, on Public Sediment, a project that reimagined Alameda Creek. The project was the research category winner in the 2024 EDRA's Great Places Awards.
Public Sediment was a plan to reimagine Alameda Creek with the San Francisco Bay, and included a network of community spaces that would reclaim the creek as a place for people. Snyder and his colleagues developed the project’s public engagement component that included toolkits and stories from people who had a deep knowledge of the area.
“We certainly saw our role as trying to reach across and engage many different kinds of communities to engage them in different ways to get the breadth of local knowledge that you can get about a place by speaking with the people who know it the best,” said Snyder.
For a different project that began before the pandemic, Snyder and Napawan developed various platforms for community engagement. One of these involved smartphones, but the other was more analog. They developed a toolkit about climate change and left chalk and stencils at various sites throughout San Francisco. The digital and the analog together provided a forum for people to talk about how they were seeing climate change in their own neighborhoods.
“They helped us to visualize and think about ways in which the landscape used to function, and we were also able to hear what people value so we can think about how any proposed design could really address critical issues,” said Snyder.
A vision of the future with augmented reality
In recent years, Snyder’s work has focused closer to his roots as a designer at the intersection of media and architecture. His first big project was called Museum of the Phantom City, which is an iPhone app that lets users see visionary but unbuilt architecture on the proposed site.
He also teaches the studio class at UC Davis, “Graphitecture,” which involves augmented reality posters, viewable through your mobile phone, focused on sites across California through the lens of climate change. Over the last two years he has offered the class, Snyder’s students produced around 30 posters. Many of these were on display for the project’s popup exhibition in San Francisco Design Week in 2023.
“I was able to see people you know experiencing these posters in real time,” said Snyder. “I had a couple of student volunteers with me to show the exhibition and it made me see the work in a new light.”
It was then that Snyder realized this work should be collected as a book. In fall 2025, he will release the culmination of this work in California Changing: 50 Sites of Climate Change in Augmented Reality.
Snyder also has other projects that combine deep community engagement and imagining what’s possible. The UC Climate Action Arts Network (CAAN) has also funded Snyder and his collaborators, which includes fellow Professor of Design Glenda Drew, to amplify the role of arts in fostering climate justice, engaging vulnerable communities, and driving sustainable change. Block Party: From Independent Living to Disability Communalism, reimagines the architecture and urbanism of a section of Berkeley, California, through the perspectives of disability rights and housing justice.
“We’re thinking not just about accessibility, but almost how do you bring joy to these sites and not just accommodating for accessibility,” said Snyder. “For all our projects, I think really working with people expands our possibilities.”
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