Project summary

A pop-up installation during Boston's inaugural Tech Week, Ship It! is a project by tech startup veteran and AI Safety volunteer Lauren Mecca that invites participants to:

• Witness the gap between the world you want and the world AI seems to be creating.

• Ponder the accountability structure of bots, their designers, and their users.

• Speak your desires for the Intelligence Age into existence.

The most important conversations about AI are happening in two rooms that do not talk to each other. One room is full of builders and researchers making decisions that will shape how billions of people live. The other is full of those billions of people, with no framework for engaging and no channel for making their preferences known.

Ship It!’s organizers believe AI can have wonderful outcomes if more people work to bridge this gap. 

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

50% of the public now say they're more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021 (Pew Research Institute 2026). AI builders and researchers - even those focused on AI Safety - operate in rooms inaccessible to the general public. Ship It! is a fast, distinctive, replicable test of one bridge across that gap, run by practitioners with safety mindsets.

Goal: Pilot an immersive installation as an intervention to solve the public input problem in AI. With proven impact and funding, I’d commit full-time to developing similar programs that gather data and drive participatory AI across wider audiences.

Barriers Ship It! overcomes: 

Dominant AI narratives minimize real day-to-day concerns → Ship It! presents research-driven experiences that acknowledge these concerns, inviting those otherwise tuned out to tune in.

Irreconcilable views of AI → Ship It! puts the people shaping the tech ecosystem and the people living with its consequences in the same room to build shared vocabulary. 

Lack of participatory change → Ship It! captures data on the knowledge gaps, fears and misconceptions driving public opinion that can inform engagement strategy across AI Safety orgs. 

Pilot targets: 

• 250 people reached in-person

• 10,000 reached via press and social media coverage

• 200 signups to email newsletter for continued engagement with AI governance and public participation news and future event announcements 

Ship It! is held during Boston's inaugural Tech Week 2026, an a16z-organized convening that will concentrate ~10,000 technology professionals in the city. Sited in Fort Point with signage from the bridges connecting downtown Boston to the Seaport tech hub, the installation is designed to draw both Tech Week attendees and walk-in visitors from the surrounding neighborhoods.

How it gets done:

Five stations structured around participation. Visitors move through Hype Corner (a timeline of broken tech-industry promises from "the problem of spam will be gone within two years" to current AGI claims, framed by the question "What's artificial here?"); a Double Speak station demonstrating scripted scenarios of current AI assistant behavior that show retention-optimized responses presented as care; Limited Liability, a Monopoly-inspired game that makes AI's asymmetrical gains and externalized costs tangible through play; Say What You Will, where visitors are invited to speak their desires for the AI future with radical honesty.

Artifacts that outlive the day. Co-created assets are designed to circulate beyond Tech Week: inviting additions via social media and published to tech-ish.org; as the basis for media coverage carrying public perception of AI into tech industry-facing outlets; to be shared with AI Safety organizations as reference material for engagement strategies. An opportunity to develop a custom report via survey and interview data gathered throughout the day.

To demonstrate the power of bridging silos, collaborators bring several corners of the local community together. Curators are practicing AI practitioners, researchers, and educators; creators include Artists for Humanity (Boston youth creative-tech collective) and Masary Studios (multidisciplinary art incorporating AI), with volunteer AI Safety researchers contributing to content.

How will this funding be used?

The installation is self-funded to date, with a few key elements currently out of budget. An additional $2,000 will cover:

• Photo + video production which will support promotion, generate interest in future installations, and help future funding applications

• Extended hours in the gallery space for an evening reception including members of the local press
  

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

Led by Lauren Mecca: I’m an exhibition organizer at the National Gallery of Art turned Customer Success executive to AI startups. I left my tech job, took the Introductory EA Course, and started facilitating AI Safety workshops in 5 different cities with the AI Safety Awareness Project. I also facilitate my own salons called Tech/ish across the country (https://www.tech-ish.org/), where people with disparate views of AI discuss developments, research, risks and changes. Ship It! was inspired by my December AI and Creativity event in Asheville, North Carolina which convened dozens of artists with tech enthusiasts around artworks made with and without AI tools. The gathering educated participants on topics ranging from copyrighting AI-assisted work to ways to prompt various models for desired creative effect, and we welcomed passionate views. We left with respectful understanding of different approaches to AI and resources to engage in with the technology or associated movements. The installation was volunteer-supported, cost only $150 and generated $300 in ticket revenue.

Ship It! is also supported by tech executives Erica Ayotte and Elizabeth Breese (go-to-market), Jennifer Borchardt (UX), art collectives Masary Studios and Artists for Humanity, and AI Safety researchers. 

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The three failure modes we’re planning around:

1. Low builder turnout. Boston Tech Week is a crowded calendar and an unconventional installation will be competing with product demos and recruiting events. 

Mitigation: a16z calendar placement, PR outreach already scoped, collaborators with their own networks and draw. 

Outcome if it happens anyway: the event still produces the artifacts, and the documentation circulates, but the in-room dialogue with members of the tech ecosystem is diminished. Would consider deeper partnership with an established tech industry group to promote attendance in future.

2. The accountability framing doesn't land. The content could be read as anti-tech or moralizing. If builders interpret the installation as a critique rather than an invitation to participate in setting norms, they disengage and the bridges aren't built. 

Mitigation: organizers are not anti-AI. The content is grounded in documented agent behaviors, security findings, industry euphemisms. The framing centers builder agency rather than restriction. 

Outcome if it happens anyway: lower-quality artifacts, weaker media pitch, consider reframing for public engagement instead of bridge-building.

3. The installation doesn't translate into anything beyond the week due to lack of organization or follow-through. 

Mitigation: planning post-event social media (controllable), newsletter engagement (somewhat controllable), PR coverage (not guaranteed). Polling AI Safety organizations for high-value surveys or other data that Ship It! is well-positioned to capture. 

Outcome if it happens anyway: Tech/ish absorbs the cost as a learning input for the next installation, but the larger thesis about installation as effective for participatory change gets less evidence behind it.

A version of this project will happen regardless of this grant. The grant determines quality and the depth of the collaborator bench — both of which affect whether the pilot clears the bar from "interesting event" to "thing that could actually improve understanding and effectiveness of AI governance/advocacy.”

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

Self-funded by the organizing team: $2,500 covers digital art development fees, central Boston gallery space reservation at 40% discount, installation supplies.