Hidden City. Finding Stillness.

I'm Howard Chambers — a placemaker, urban technologist, systems thinker, inclusive designer, mom, and New Yorker. Sixteen years of living in NYC, paying attention to what the street sensibility does to the body, mind, and spirit. Micromoment is where that attention becomes a product.

In 2011 I wandered into a BMW Guggenheim Lab session on a New York sidewalk and ended up wearing a skin-conductance wristband on a guided walk through the neighborhood: blank concrete and glass raised my heart rate and anxiety, greenery and lively storefronts brought it back down. That afternoon put me inside the psychogeography research community that still grounds this work.

I hold an MFA from Parsons Transdisciplinary Design, where I've also taught, and spent close to a decade leading an enterprise-wide inclusive design and accessibility program at Johnson & Johnson — work that trained me to design for the full range of nervous systems, not just the easiest ones. I co-founded Softwalks, a clip-on kit that turns NYC scaffolding into public seating, recognized with a Fast Company Innovation by Design Award and shown at Design Indaba. I also lead the Sanga, a monthly gathering for women across design, UX, and urban infrastructure.

All of it feeds WabiCity, the design-research platform and living philosophy I founded for building cities that restore rather than deplete us. It brings together wabi-sabi, science, accessibility, and sensory design — water, sound, nature, third places, contemplation, serendipity — to shape cities around how people feel, connect, heal, and belong, not just how efficiently they move through them. Micromoment is WabiCity's thesis, made into something you can carry in your pocket.

As a kid in Seattle I found my way to the Queen Anne viewpoints whenever my nerves needed it. Years later in Philadelphia, with a grieving friend and nowhere to take her, I found the river's edge by instinct. Micromoment is that instinct, turned into infrastructure.