Design Groups New York

Inside the next generation of BIM - An evening with Motif in New York City

​We're bringing together a small group of architects and builders at NeueHouse Madison Square on October 6 for an exploration of how agent-native, open, collaborative BIM is reshaping how buildings are designed. ​Join **Amar Hanspal, Tatjana Dzambazova and Matt Jezyk** from the Motif team for a live walk-through of their new product **Motif Design** and a conversation about the next generation of BIM. ​Space is limited, so registration helps us manage capacity and ensure we can accommodate everyone. Feel free to share the event with colleagues. The time for this event is 6PM - 9PM (EST).

A Decade of Social Science + Architecture

Join us for a special evening celebrating **10 years of the AIA Social Science + Architecture Committee**, a decade of advancing conversations at the intersection of **research, human behavior, equity, advocacy, and the built environment**. Founded on a commitment to **interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange**, the committee has spent the past ten years building a vibrant community of architects, researchers, strategists, educators, and industry leaders exploring how **social science can shape more responsive, inclusive, and human-centered environments**. The evening will bring together **past and present members, collaborators, and co-leaders** for a reflective and forward-looking gathering. Through shared stories, presentations, provocations, and conversation, we will look back on the ideas, partnerships, and impact that have defined the last decade, while also exploring **emerging questions shaping the next ten years of architecture and design**. The event will feature: * A **“by the numbers” look at 10 years of committee impact and programming** * **Reflections from past co-leaders and contributors** * **Dinner conversations** inspired by the committee’s original founding format * **Provocations and future-focused discussions** on the evolving role of social science in architecture * Opportunities to **reconnect with long-term members, collaborators, and the broader design community** At its core, the celebration is about **ideas, community, and the continued belief that architecture is deeply connected to human experience**. We look forward to **celebrating the past 10 years, and imagining the next 10 together**. **Stay Tuned:** We are currently finalizing the details for this event. To ensure you receive the official invitation, please keep an eye on [the AIA NY Social Science and Architecture Committee’s page](https://www.aiany.org/committees/social-science-architecture-committee/) and follow [PLASTARC ](https://plastarc.com/)for updates.

UX Happy Hour irl (open to all levels)

######## You need to bring a physical Government Issued ID to be allowed to stay. It's the Law. ######## Whether you're a seasoned UX pro, just breaking into the field, or simply curious about design — this is your invite to pull up a chair and join the conversation. UX Happy Hour is a laid-back, no-agenda gathering where designers, researchers, product thinkers, and anyone design-curious can connect over drinks in a low-pressure setting. No slides. No networking theater. **Why attend:** • Meet new connection in organic way • Get feedback and fresh perspectives on your work (i.e. portfolio) or advice for your career • Stay sharp on what's happening in UX, AI, product, and tech right now • Meet potential collaborators, mentors, or future coworkers • Cheap drinks ($5 Guinness) **What to expect:** • Warm, welcoming crowd across all experience levels • Candid conversations about design, careers, tools, and everything in between • A great chill bar in the East Village to do it all in **Where to find us:** We're usually tucked in by the ATM at the back of Mona's. If you're not sure where we are, just ask the bartender — they know us! Come solo, bring a friend, or drag a coworker along. The more the merrier. Interested in sponsoring this event? Reach out to Danny (one of the organizers) for our sponsorship rate card.

Signs of Creative Minds: "Arts" and Sign: HOST NEEDED!

Socializing and Networking / North Jersey edition

How’s your fall going, awesome design community? Join fellow UXDs, UXRs, PMs, developers, and design-curious folks for a relaxed evening of drinks and pizza hosted by UXPA-NJ at the Wanderer in Jersey City. All acronyms welcome. Come enjoy the changing leaves, Halloween season, and local/ non-local recommendations with familiar faces and new friends. No pressure, no agenda, just a chance to unwind and chill out. Pull up a seat, make a new connection, and enjoy a laid-back night with good company. Candy corns are optional. Conversation is encouraged. 🍂🎃 The Wanderer is a “caffeine to cocktails” bar tucked between Cafe Alyse & One World Pizza in the McGinley Square neighborhood of Jersey City. And lucky us, the Wanderer hosts a Happy Hour on Tuesdays! Discounted select beer & wines and pizzas from One World Pizza next door. *Did someone say Happy Hour?* There will be no agenda or speakers for this event. We just want to encourage informal socializing. **(Not an) Agenda:** 5:30 pm - 8:00 pm Socializing, networking, drinks & maybe pizza (cash bar) Feel free to stay later! **The Wanderer** **53 Baldwin Ave, Jersey City, NJ 07304** 🏃🏽‍♂️ **18 minute walk** from Journal Square Path station 🚌 **By bus:** NJTransit route #s 9, 8, 87, 80 🚲 **Citibike station:** Baldwin at Montgomery 🚗 **Street parking available**, with the Parkmobile app https://www.instagram.com/thewanderer_jerseycity [https://www.instagram.com/one_world_pizza/](https://www.instagram.com/one_world_pizza/) [ParkMobile Parking App | Find & Pay for Parking | On-street & Reservation](https://parkmobile.io/)

17 Years on Wheels, 20 years at Google: Subways, Wheelchairs and Maps

This event will be online on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/D31AFpfMLp8) and in-person (New York City). **The speaker and livestream start at 7:30 pm ET**. In-person attendees may arrive as early as 7 pm ET. If arriving late, please leave a comment on this page and someone will come down ASAP. **Description** In 2009, a dramatic accident in Central Park profoundly altered my life trajectory, instantly becoming 1 in 4 people worldwide living with significant disabilities. Ever since, I've navigated the world in a wheelchair, relearning what it means to be a New York father, Google Maps engineer, and athlete. Despite the challenges, though, I've more frequently found gratitude, purpose, and even joy in the vast, strong community of people with disabilities. Gratitude for all we've accomplished in the last half-century, and both purpose and joy in working with disabled folk and allies to extend those gains. In the physical world, fighting and winning a subway accessibility lawsuit, and online, adding disability-aware data and features to Google Maps so people of all abilities can "know before we go" if a place and route are a good choice. **Presenter bio** [Sasha Blair-Goldensohn](www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-blair-goldensohn-429a5125b) leads Google Maps accessibility and disability innovation projects, helping people worldwide find accessible places and routes. He is also a disability rights activist with the Elevator Action Group for New York City subway accessibility, and has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, PBS, Vital City, Vice News, New Mobility, and West Side Rag. **Accessibility** The presentation will have human captions [CC], not automatic captions. For ASL preferred speakers, learn about the [Aira ASL App](https://aira.io/aira-asl-app/), and download it before the event. For the Blind and Low Vision community, learn about the [Aira Explorer App](https://aira.io/aira-explorer-app/) and download it before the event. To access the online webinar for audio description, use the A11yNYC Access Offer to call, or simply inform your Visual Interpreter that you'd like that offer applied when you connect. For additional accessibility requirements, please email meryl@equalentry.com **two weeks** **before** the event. **Livestream** View on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/D31AFpfMLp8) Provided by Internet Society Accessibility SIG. **Location details** The event is at 72 Spring Street on the 4th floor. Everyone must be accompanied to the event on the 4th floor. Because everyone needs to be escorted, please arrive early or on time. When you enter the ground floor, a representative from A11yNYC will be there to provide elevator access. **Transit** The building 72 Spring Street is near several transit stops: 6 train * Spring Street (non-accessible stop): 100 feet * Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.4 miles B/D/F/M trains * Broadway-Lafayette Street (accessible stop), 0.2 miles N/Q/R/W trains * Prince Street (non-accessible stop): 0.2 miles * Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.3 miles M1 / M55 Bus lines * Broadway/Spring Street stop: 500 feet Cabs and rideshares can let passengers out right near the building entrance. **Finding the building** In Google Maps, find 72 Spring Street. It shows the correct location of the entrance: on Spring Street, halfway between Crosby and Lafayette. It’s also between the Glossier store and the Krewe Eyewear store. Inside and over the reception desk in our building 72 Spring St, it says “Marc Jacobs.” **Traveling to the event?** We recommend [Hotel on Rivington](https://www.hotelonrivington.com/) or [Crosby Street Hotel](https://www.firmdalehotels.com/hotels/crosby-street-hotel). **Accreditation** All A11yNYC meetups are pre-approved for IAAP Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAEC). **Sponsors** Thanks to [Aira](https://aira.io/), [AKQA](https://www.akqa.com/), [Deque](https://www.deque.com/), [Evinced](https://www.evinced.com/), and [Equal Entry](https://equalentry.com/) for sponsoring. Want to be a sponsor? Contact meryl@equalentry.com

[In-person] Meet for SPEED

Join up for an opportunity to work together on optimizing our sites. [Paul Calvano](https://paulcalvano.com/) and [Sergey Chernyshev](https://www.sergeychernyshev.com/) guide the discussion and help you understand the speed of your pages and how optimize them. Have a site you'd like us to analyze? Add it here - [https://nywebperf.com/meet4speed](https://nywebperf.com/meet4speed) You can benefit even if you can't edit your site right now - we will be happy to share the knowledge. We'll all learn how to see what's slow and how to make it fast! Here is what you can learn: * Identify optimization opportunities using tools Chrome DevTools, WebPageTest and Telescope. * Become a master in reading the network waterfall. * Understand the most of the performance flame chart. * Learn the latest trends in measuring site speed. To be able to attend our events, you will need to show your ID at the security desk. Please make sure to provide your full name if your name on Meetup platform doesn't match your ID.

From Idea to Website: A Lovable Workshop — Reverse Network Meet

Imagine arriving with nothing more than a business idea and leaving with a the concept of a working website you built yourself. That is precisely what this evening is designed to deliver. Join us for a practical, hands-on session with Lovable, where you will build a real website live using AI — no coding experience required. There will be no two hours of slides to endure. Instead, you will spend the evening building something you can genuinely use. The Experience: We will guide you through the entire process, step by step: 6:00–6:20 PM — Welcome, Overview of Ideal IT Eco-System Set-up for Small Business, AI Policy and Lovable Introduction: Discover what Lovable can do, in which ideal IT Ecosystem it lives and prepare to build. 6:20–7:20 PM — Build Your First Page: Follow along as we transform an idea into a real, functioning webpage. 7:20–7:45 PM — Make It Yours: Add your business information, content, and personality. 7:45–8:00 PM — Q&A and Get your questions answered. About Reverse Network Meets Reverse Networking events can happen anywhere, from parks and co-working spaces to bars, clubs and more. Invite the people you've connected with online and meet them all in one place in real life. Skip endless coffee meetings and connect with multiple people at once. Tuesday, Oct 6 · 6:00 PM EDT Get on the host's list https://www.staaake.in/irislentjes Host your own reverse network get together https://www.reversenetworkmeets.com NOT a staaake event - contact the host for details

Join Us for the Staten Island Ferry Photo Shoot (Sat, Oct 10, 2026 @ 11:00 am)

Join us for a relaxed photography outing aboard the Staten Island Ferry! We'll photograph the Lower Manhattan skyline, Statue of Liberty, harbor activity, and everyday moments aboard the ferry, with changing perspectives in both directions. All skill levels are welcome, whether you're bringing a camera or a smartphone. **PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES** **Technique Focus:** * **Capturing movement:** Practice faster shutter speeds for sharp shots from the moving ferry. * **Creative composition:** Use railings, windows, and the ferry's wake as framing elements and leading lines. * **Changing perspective:** Mix wide skyline views with tighter details and layered compositions. * **Visual storytelling:** Create a three-photo series that captures your experience of the outing. **Papers to Read Before Event** * [Try More Wide Angle](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13XVPrS_sLO9Fuv1cxzu7F_ra0NUZ_Uhw/view?usp=drive_link) * [Try a Different Point of View](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QgGLJzArDem9NvewxJAG9OonITXOyQPX/view?usp=drive_link) * [Photographic Composition](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bl2f77jLT6IRxmY55wIbVtiM3y0Bx_fq/view?usp=drive_link) **Meeting Location/Event Hosts/What to Expect** Your hosts will be Doug and several organizers. We will be wearing our TAOP NYC hats so it will be easy to recognize us. **Itinerary** **11:00 am:** Meet just inside the street-level main entrance of Whitehall Terminal, 4 Whitehall Street, keeping clear of the doors. **11:30 am:** Depart for Staten Island, photographing along the way. **Around 11:55 am:** Arrive at St. George, disembark, and regroup for a short photo stop before reboarding. **12:30 pm:** Take the return ferry, finishing at Whitehall around 1:00 pm. **Post-Event** TBD. **PHOTO CHALLENGE** Once this Meetup event ends, we will create an album on the [Photos](https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-photography-nyc/photos/) page. Please post up to five (5) of your best photographs from the event before 7 PM (ET) on Sunday, October 18, 2026. Eligible photos: * Must be taken on Saturday, October 10th. * Must be posted before the deadline * **Must have a title** * Must NOT be sexually explicit or suggestive This album will be reviewed. The winning image will become the permanent album cover of the event. The name of the winning photographer will appear in the album title. **We welcome your participation and look forward to meeting you at 11:00 am.**

Meet in the Arts

[Which art style are you? Vote and see who shares your lane.](https://app.favr.town/polls/s_378XeL85R4csGQ?r=@lovemaze) Our preferences in art reveal more about us than we often realize. Long before personality traits were formally categorized, psychologists studied personality differences through individuals' ratings of various paintings. If you find yourself drawn to the same piece of artwork, there's a strong chance you share a deep connection. Meet in the museum for an excursion. Sign up on [favr.town](https://favr.town/) and predict your next art buddy before you meet. Find out if you're right when you meet onsite. Or, if you fancy other museums, pin them at times that work for you on [favr.town](https://favr.town/) and discover who you might meet there. Note: This is a [Favr.town](http://favr.town/) member exclusive event. [Join](https://favr.town/events/meet-and-shop-trader-joes-trader-joes-2026-06-15-17-00) [[https://favr.town](https://favr.town/) ] Hint: Fans of abstract art tend to be creative, pop art lovers are often optimistic, impressionism enthusiasts are more likely to be conscientious, and those who prefer traditional art tend to be, well, more traditional. Something extra: Why do these traits matter? See how [optimism](https://favr.town/blog/the-power-of-optimism-in-relationships-how-a-positive-outlook-strengthens-resilience-emotional-health-and-lasting-love-2025-11-20), [conscientiousness](https://favr.town/blog/how-responsibility-and-reliability-build-trust-and-lasting-love-2026-04-19), [traditional values](https://favr.town/blog/prioritizing-family-values-for-lasting-commitment-and-love-2025-12-17), and [excitement](https://favr.town/blog/how-novelty-play-and-shared-adventure-keep-love-alive-2025-12-14) influence relationships. You can also measure how your sense of [optimism](https://app.favr.town/we?t=1&s=1&b=OPTIMISTIC), [conscientiousness](https://app.favr.town/we?t=1&s=2&b=CONSCIENTIOUS), [traditional values](https://app.favr.town/we?t=1&s=2&b=TRADITIONAL), and [excitement](https://app.favr.town/we?t=1&s=2&b=EXCITING) stack up against others.

Rust NYC: Zero Knowledge Proofs & GPUs in Rendering

Join us on **Thursday, October 8th at our sponsor Materialize**. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. to give attendees plenty of time to grab pizza and socialize, and the talk begin at 7:15 p.m.We have two incredible speakers for y'all! **John Wu is a Research Engineer at Nethermind and will be speaking on Building Zero Knowledge Applications in Rust.** I work in cryptography and high-performance computing: my research is on making zero-knowledge proofs much faster, which turns out to be as much about data representation and memory behavior as it is about the mathematics. One thing that buys you: proving your identity directly from a government-issue id without having to share your personal information like name or address to other people. Before that I built security tooling for Apple's SRE team that deployed seamlessly onto Kubernetes across AWS and Apple's bare-metal machines, consensus and networking systems for Mina Protocol's zero-knowledge blockchain, and operator lowerings in LLVM's torch-mlir. I like ZK most when the math and the machine code have to agree. This talk demystifies zero-knowledge proofs for Rust developers by breaking them down from first principles: arithmetic constraints, witnesses, finite-field polynomials, sum-check, commitments, and folding schemes. We'll explain how a computation becomes something a prover can convince a verifier about, without revealing the underlying data. Then we'll connect the math to real implementation work with a Rust case study: a small-value optimization I implemented in Microsoft's open-source prover, speeding up exactly the repetitive hashing and signature checks that a passport proof is built from, by letting small values stay small instead of paying full field width for every one. That's what makes the application real — proving your identity from a government passport in real time, rather than as an offline batch job. The goal is to leave attendees with both a conceptual map of ZK and a concrete feel for how high-performance proving systems are built. **Austin Matthies is an engine/animation systems programmer and will be speaking on how Rust intersects with GPU compute and graphics through modern graphics APIs.** How can we leverage the power of modern GPUs to perform rendering while offloading our massively parallel work via general purpose compute? In this talk, we will explore how to utilize Rust, Modern Graphics APIs/frameworks, and the open-source software ecosystem to build fast, efficient, and reliable applications. Many supporting libraries can be found in Rust, but we will consider where C++ libraries can accelerate our progress. Next, we will compare shading languages and cover interoperability of graphics APIs and vendor-specific compute frameworks. Lastly, we will address some common challenges that may come up when developing your application **[Lawrence Harvey](https://www.lawrenceharvey.com/)** is Rust NYC's official recruitment partner, with Ross providing support as a co-organizer and financial support. The space is generously sponsored by our partner **Materialize.**

Drupal and AI Office Hours

Let's meet up to talk about what each of us is doing with Drupal, with or without AI. Feel free to bring your laptop to show and tell everyone about your latest Drupal project, contribution, or challenge. Our goal is to help each other learn Drupal, leverage AI, and even talk about our AI anxiety in a friendly, communal setting. We want to share AI and Drupal tips and tricks and help each other solve problems. Join us on Wednesday, October 7th, 2026, at 6 pm at The 922 3rd Ave, New York, NY. We can grab some food and drinks and chat about whatever is on our minds. If you can't make it, join us in November for a date and location that are TBD.