What else is possible?
Another world doesn't begin as an abstract idea; it takes shape through the everyday work of people experimenting with new ways of living, governing, organizing, and creating together.
I'm interested in how design, art, and craft can help expand our collective sense of what’s possible—both through speculative projects that imagine alternatives, and also by working alongside communities, organizations, and institutions as they do the practical, often messy work of bringing alternatives into being.
A few things I’m working on…
Different design pedagogies and practices
How else might we teach, learn, and do design?
This is long-standing interest of mine, something I’ve been working on for almost two decades. I began my academic career teaching design in the context of the humanities. Today I’m teaching a humanities-inflected design in the context of computing. Over the past two years I’ve been working with colleagues in The Keller Center at Princeton to develop a design minor, set in a school of engineering and applied sciences, within the broader context of a traditional liberal arts university.
Part of this work has to do with the institutional settings of design education, part of it has to do with historical discipline of design as a profession.
The design education and practice we inherited was built for a particular world. It helped create products, markets, and industries, and it continues to shape how we imagine what design is for. But other worlds demand other design practices. How might we reimagine the discipline of design and then how else might we teach and learn design? What can we learn from people who have long been making institutions and communities without ever claiming the title of designer: organizers, craftspeople, educators, and public servants?
This is as much a project of learning as it is of critique: gathering ideas from many traditions and putting them to work through research, teaching, workshops, and collaborative practice.
It’s also project of in-the-world experimentation. For example here’s some things I’m exploring in practice…
What if rather than the typical client relationship that characterizes design, we practiced design as accompaniment?
What if taught design as a method of inquiry?
What does design leadership look like in a public or civic context, wherein profit and market dominance aren’t the motivating values?
Doing meaningful work inside systems & institutions we no longer believe in
How can we think clearly, act deliberately, and remain accountable under conditions where reform is insufficient and complicity is inevitable?
Under The Circumstances began as a book project with ken anderson. It’s a place for us to think in public together: essays, conversations, field notes, and unfinished ideas about the complications of our contemporary conditions. We tell a lot of stories, and many of them are uncomfortably familiar: public meetings where the important question cannot be asked within the rules of the meeting; participatory processes designed to absorb dissent without changing outcomes; projects that succeed according to every metric and still make things worse. We’re interested in figuring out what to do inside these conditions. The compromises we’re willing to make. The lines we refuse to cross. The small practices through which we try to build livable worlds inside damaged systems.
Not solutions, exactly. But bearings.