In 2011, Davenport founded Living Observatory,[1] a non-profit, learning collaborative that focuses on documenting and sharing the long term story of wetland restoration of former cranberry farms.
Davenport writes: "As cinema frees itself from the constraints of the inherently linear celluloid base, a new meta-cinema explodes the myth of the heroic by projecting itself into our everyday environments.
As an improvisational learning partner, meta-cinema invites us to articulate new hypotheses, to sensorially augment our dialogs, to share multi-point of view stories, and to engage in sociable interchange between all people.
Conceived of as an in-depth cinematic case study of urban change before during and after the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition, the interactive video disc version of the film as delivered on a Project Athena workstation in 1987 invited students to view the movie based on a particular story thread or character and allowed students to edit material from the film and place it into their written papers.
Using a hyper-link tool developed by Hans Peter Brondmo, viewers could define media segments and place them as video tags on the appropriate portion of time-lapse journey along the banks of the Charles.creating in effect a cinematic cut-away.
[9] Collaborators at the Responsive Environments Group include Brian Mayton, Gershon Dublon, Spencer Russell, Donald Haddad and Joe Paradiso.