Smol Gardens presented at Makeshift 2026: Accountable Tech By Design

Makeshift 2026 event screening room, hosted during NYC x Design Week at SVA IXD in New York City, May 20-21, 2026.

Smol Gardens was accepted to present at MakeShift 2026, a conference supported by SVA, Helpful Places, Superbloom, and NSF POSE. The workshop was collaboratively presented by Priyanka Thomas, Krizia Fernando, and Kris Rubiano.

About the Talk

The session focused on the current state of AI-enabled web design, a self-auditing impact framework, and small language models as a responsible alternative to large language models.

Smol Gardens Project is a participatory design study that aims to introduce Responsible Computing principles in a fast-paced era of AI-driven development. For builders, these guiding principles reinforce continuous accountability as part of their process, with the goal of strengthening community agency and democratic self-governance. The team also presented the Seedscore impact assessment toolkit, an evaluation scorecard that helps teams measure human, systems and environmental impact when using SLM or LLM-driven platforms.

Workshop participants applied the framework by vibecoding a simple AI application using a small language model and evaluating its impact across three core areas: human and societal impact, future systems, and environmental responsibility.

Smol Gardens is designed for designers, builders, and civic technologists already using AI tools in their work but feeling caught between the pressure to move fast and the need to build responsibly.

About Smol Gardens

Smol Gardens is an initiative by the Femmecubator team, introduced at BetaNYC's UnSchool of Data 2026 conference, and pitched as part of the Open Civic Tech initiative.

To learn more about Smol Gardens, check out our documentation. Reach out at hello@smolgardens,net to contribute to the working group.