newgray is a tankthink: an alternative to the conventional think tank and a hybrid platform for artistic research, social design, public policy, collective pedagogy, and the commons.
newgray is not a conventional policy institute. It is a think tank performed as a conceptual, artistic, and civic project. Our work combines sociology, urban studies, design, art, architecture, technology, and public pedagogy. We treat the think tank as a cultural form — asking what research looks like when it is accountable to public life rather than donors, markets, or state bureaucracy.
A progressive artistic research and social design studio dedicated to rebuilding and reimagining public life. We produce policy papers, visual research, public tools, exhibitions, workshops, and media projects that challenge privatization, austerity, inequality, and the managed decline of the commons.
Hakan Topal
Artist, Engineer,
Sociologist
Professor of New Media and Art+Design
Purchase College, SUNY
Topal's work brings together art, design, technology, urban studies, and social theory. Trained first as an engineer, he later studied Gender and Women's Studies and received a Ph.D. in Sociology from The New School for Social Research. He is currently a full professor at SUNY Purchase College.
His research and artistic practice examine public life, political power, urban space, collective memory, technology, and cultural institutions.
Topal has led research-driven media, design, digital archive, exhibition, and technology projects for arts, cultural, and educational institutions. His experience includes documentary production, public mapping, open-source learning platforms, exhibition media, institutional strategy, and planning for cultural spaces.
The Public After Privatization
What happens when public goods are outsourced, financialized, or managed through private contractors? This research area examines the erosion of public institutions and the transfer of public responsibility to private developers, nonprofit contractors, consultants, and philanthropic systems. Outputs include policy papers, visual explainers, public databases, maps, op-eds, teach-ins, and exhibitions.
Commoning and Public Imagination
This research area studies and supports forms of collective stewardship, shared infrastructure, public access, mutual care, and democratic governance. It asks how commons can be designed, protected, maintained, and imagined across urban space, culture, education, technology, and public services.
Rethinking Cultural and Educational Institutions
This area examines art institutions, museums, universities, exhibitions, residencies, and cultural funding as civic infrastructure. It focuses on institutional ethics, cultural labor, exhibition models, and public pedagogy. It asks how design research can reshape institutions in tangible ways: through architecture, spatial planning, information systems, communication structures, public programs, and shared governance models.
Tools for Counter-Publics
This area produces practical tools for communities, organizers, researchers, artists, and public-interest groups. Outputs may include community websites, campaign toolkits, public data dashboards, legal and policy explainers, neighborhood research templates, and open-source civic media tools.
newgray studio provides consulting, design, research, media production, exhibition strategy, and public communication services.
This structure allows newgray to remain flexible while supporting public research, artistic experimentation, and paid collaboration.Contact hello@newgray.com
newgray Studio
Consulting, design, research, media production, exhibition strategy, and public communication services. The earned-income engine.
newgray Institute
Public-facing research program. Policy papers, public tools, workshops, teach-ins. May operate through fiscal sponsorship or later become a separate nonprofit.
newgray Editions
Reports, maps, books, posters, datasets, and conceptual objects.
A Commonist Manifesto
Commonism: Against the Emptying of the Public. A foundational argument for commons-based civic life against the managed decline of public institutions.
ForthcomingPublic Money, Private Salaries
Executive compensation in publicly funded nonprofits. How public subsidy underwrites private enrichment across the nonprofit industrial complex.
ForthcomingThe Contractor City
Mapping public money and private operators across urban infrastructure and service delivery.
Forthcomingnewgray discloses who funds its work, what they fund, and what they do not control. Research, design, and publishing practices are guided by public accountability, methodological clarity, fair compensation, and care for the communities whose struggles and knowledge shape the work.
Full disclosure of funders, project scope, and editorial independence. No undisclosed conflicts of interest.
Research accountable to the publics it studies — not to donors, markets, or state bureaucracy.
Fair pay for all collaborators, researchers, designers, and community participants. No unpaid labor.
Tools
Templates, explainers, dashboards, mapping resources, and community research kits.
Editions
Printed reports, posters, books, maps, and conceptual objects.
Journal
Short essays, field notes, responses, diagrams, and public arguments.
Network
Commission, fund, invite, partner, publish, or join a working group.