Center for Complexity was created out of a partnership between RISD and Infosys in 2018. Over the last five years, this partnership has supported many courses for RISD students (including this fall’s studio: Design Manuals for the Anthropocene), over 75 academic and public programs exploring the role of artistic and design practices in responding to global challenges, and the delivery of dozens of courses in Strategic Design to Infosys staff and contractors. These 4-week courses were taught in person until the pandemic, and are now taught online by CfC’s Strategic Programs Team.
One of the slipperiest words in a design practice is “studio.” At different moments, it means different things. It can be a place, a process, an organization, a class format, or a state of mind. We asked Katie Edmonds, newly promoted Assistant Director of Strategic Design & Programs at CfC, to share some reflections on how her team developed a remote design studio to meet the needs of international cohorts in the wake of Covid.
Notes from Center for Complexity’s Strategic Programs remote studios
1
It’s 7:30am on a Monday in the US Eastern time zone, 12:30pm in London, and 6:30pm in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Chennai. It’s the 21st time we’ve welcomed a fresh cohort of participants into the experience. Today we’ll get to know each other through prompts typed in a chat window, some cameras on and some off, then paste a link to a virtual whiteboard to get started on our first exercise. Cursors labeled with names swirl around a screen patterned with concentric circles. I unlock a digital layer and delete it to reveal a cropped photograph of an object, emphasizing its abstract visual qualities. “What do you see?” a colleague asks. An hour from now we’ll ask the room to locate one particular kind of household object and hold it up to their computer’s camera. “What do you see?” I’ll ask again. Tomorrow around this time we’ll ask everyone in the room to locate a specific kind of space in their home or office, and find a way for everyone in the room to “see” it by creating artifacts of that space. What will emerge over time on the screen is language, line, shape, color, and photographic images from around the world, visualizing spaces some people know very well, and others have never experienced before. Two days from now we’ll issue a design brief, and everyone in the room will disperse into the sites and spaces near them. The digital field will fill with even more images, lines, language, and shapes. This is our remote design studio.
2
If design is the act of making through inquiry, at RISD this act is deeply informed by the material world. This process engages the senses, the hands, and all the materials we gather in pursuit of some outcome. In order to master this process RISD students commit to a period of years on campus, in studio. Our strategic partners are not students. They remain deeply embedded in life outside of campus, but still commit to developing knowledge on, and sensibilities in, the field of design, but the space / place / time of this commitment must look different.
Before Covid, in order to fit design activities into the vibrant and high-stakes ecosystem of our partners’ responsibilities, our cohorts consisted of individuals who were able to disengage from their commitments for a period of weeks. In that short window of time we attempted to cram in as much design as we could manage. These were frantic sprints, long days, punctuated by the ceremony of celebration of completing a difficult journey. The closest analogy I can land on is summer camp, but the counselors wield scholarly texts and dry-erase markers instead of lifeguard whistles and canoe paddles. We aimed to replicate the qualities of a RISD studio in our partners’ offices by taking over floors of buildings, or sections of open floor plans with a maze of whiteboards and piles of prototyping supplies. After the world went remote, we were struck with the question of how to replicate a RISD studio through a computer camera, microphone, and screen. 21 cohorts later, I believe we have managed to do more than imitate a RISD campus studio. We have created something new.
What we created relies on wifi-enabled cameras masquerading as smartphones, global satellite systems and telecommunications networks, routers and modems and passwords, mute buttons to cover up barking dogs and shouts from across the house that dinner is ready. We rely on endless two dimensional space that sits on everyone's screens at the same time, with real time access to the color and line choices of those sitting on the other side of the world, whose faces and voices and homes we can see through tiny windows. The photographs those phones can take, the marks we can make on them, the diagrams we can build of the things they help us think about start to pile up in this infinite 2d white space.
3
In the summer camp model of design workshops for working professionals, participants would travel from their homes to stay for extended periods at or near the workshop locations. Their material inquiry would begin in the same room, with the same materials. When they left the studio for the field, they would all be navigating space together as visitors. Their own tacit material knowledge would be in their homes and offices, out of reach. Any objects or matter we’d introduce into the studio would not be theirs, and it would be decontextualized. With this came a subtle but impactful suggestion that they were neutral actors in the process of inquiry. This goes against all of my extensive training in qualitative research, but before the world went remote, no alternative seemed plausible. How on earth could we convene people in a design studio without them leaving the sites and spaces they knew best? And when the world went remote, the absence of physical co-location seemed insurmountable to the studio experience. How could we ever have sensory experiences from different rooms? Different sides of the earth? The day we launched the first iteration of a remote design studio, and all the cameras from around the world turned on to reveal places and spaces each participant knew intimately, the potential for developing and applying a practice of material inquiry suddenly felt more real than it ever had felt in the summer camp model.
Let’s look at some examples of what transpired.
4
One exercise we practice to leverage our own material knowledge is to document an object you are very familiar with in a way that allows others to “see” it. Kavita chose three of her tennis rackets. Her documentation of this collection of objects surfaced insights about sunrise, the relationship between sweat and decay, and the uselessness of a racquet without a ball to hit.
We asked Navarath to look at Kavita’s documentation. Though Kavita mentioned nothing about the sensation of hitting the ball, and Navarath has no experience playing tennis, Navarath contributed the sensation of hitting the ball as hard as possible to the material inquiry of these three tennis racquets. These two ontologically distinct worlds converged through the interrogation of objects on the themes of power, speed and the sensation of propelling an object through space.
One of our other signature approaches is launching a brief for a hypothetical client, and challenging our workshop participants to visit sites that inform a response to the brief. We turn to organizations that have an international presence, but don’t fit squarely into one category. Sanitation, food systems, libraries and other ubiquitous and systems-oriented organizations fit very well into this category. In the two cases below, our workshop participants were looking at their national postal systems.
In this case, Jarett, Mint and Matt were able to access sites located in contexts they chose to identify as either urban or rural. This preliminary stage of pattern recognition serves as a launching point for designers to develop a capacity for taxonomic invention. Rather than categorizing sites and their attributes by some presumably predetermined or objective criteria, our workshop challenges participants to engage in taxonomic invention as a means of engaging with the unknown and surfacing new insights.
Chouti, Kaavya, and Pankhuri mapped their thinking after a pinup to trace one set of artifacts collected from their own homes. Where artifacts like this might otherwise require access to an archive, their homes served as both material and ethnographic source. The built-in access to the objects and individuals with deep knowledge of those objects is impossible when material-based inquiry is conducted in locations like academic campuses or business offices.
The body of work we’ve accumulated over the course of eighteen workshops is both dense and abundant. It’s also very well preserved. Whereas previous in-person workshops were built on paper and whiteboards that required transcription to be preserved, our challenge to think visually and document everything resulted in a body of work that can be returned to again and again.
5
As we emerge into the new future of hybrid work, how might we conduct these workshops in a way that benefits from both remote and co-located participation? Rather than considering an either-or model, the potential of abducting between remote and in-person engagements has value for both learning and making. Stakeholder activation through participatory and co-design approaches are already deeply ingrained in strategic design practice. It follows that the application of that knowledge to meet stakeholders where they are is an accessible next phase in advancing the field of strategic design. Thoughtful choices about travel expense, opportunity cost, business objectives, value framing and reframing can shape a sequence of co-located and remote encounters that result in the best possible outcome for the most economical resource expenditure.
What might that look like? Consider the case of a private-sector client gathering their staff at a premiere location for a major showcase of creative and technical capacity on an emerging topic. We participated in one of these events late last year, and the momentum, polish and executive visibility were all abundant. The momentum of the event after we dispersed was terrifically bottlenecked, as next steps were buried under the demands of catching up on flooded in-boxes after committing so much time and attention to this labor-intensive exercise. What if a remote beat were designed into the experience, creating a sequence of engagements rather than one hot burst of energy? Might that include a second, even third phase of activities where participants could engage from their respective contexts?
Consider the inverse scenario. Remote teams engage in inquiry and ideation that leverages the value of a distributed team. After a phase of divergent thinking and gathering of material documentation, how might a select group of participants meet in person to deepen their analysis and publish insights for a global team to apply and move forward?
6
This shallow dive into two years of remote studios is just a sample of process insights. The intention here is not to harvest the insights for you to apply. Rather, the hope is to inspire you to search for insights from your own time working remotely with a fresh perspective on where to look for value.
As we move forward into 2023 and beyond, our ambition is to continue to diverge and converge conceptually, as well as geographically, to produce the best work possible at a time when the world needs it most.
Field Notes
Our exhibition Gateways into the Polycene is live in the lobby of 20 Washington Place. Don’t miss the final gallery talks on Thursday, October 12 at 6pm! Presenters will include Lilly Manycolors (THAD/TLAD), Miguel Lastra (Hyundai Research Collaborative), and Tyanna Buie (Printmaking).
The exhibition will be installed through October 19 and includes work by Griffin Smith (EFS), Leah Beeferman (EFS), Lilly Manycolors (THAD/TLAD), Lisi Raskin (Sculpture), Megan Valanidas (ID), Miguel Lastra (Hyundai Research Collaborative), Stephanie Choi (Architecture), Tyanna Buie (Printmaking) and VF Wolf (Security/Museum).
Since last we wrote…
In February, CfC launched a new community of practice for RISD faculty and staff whose work intersects with public policy. The group of 15-20 faculty and staff from across the College met three times over lunch this past winter and spring, with presentations from Liliane Wong and Michael Grugl (INTAR), Martha Koch (LA), Marisa Mazria Katz (D+M), Charlie Cannon (ID), Kristina Sansone (TLAD), and Andrew Raftery (CER).
In May, we hosted an intensive Ocean Studio as part of our ongoing work on global security, sustainability, and just societies. Participants included Elizabeth Mendenhall, University of Rhode Island; Jon Soske, Systems of Care Fellow at Center for Complexity; Jan Stockbruegger, University of Copenhagen; Lafayette Cruise, RISD; Pupul Bisht, N Square; Curtis Bell, U.S. Naval War College; Liam Van Vleet, URI Blue MBA Graduate Student and RISD Alumni (ID 2010), and Aditi Juneja, Democracy 2076.
In June, several Center for Complexity team members attended the Creative Bureaucracy Festival in Berlin before we facilitated a retreat about Designing for Planetarity. RISD Media covered the project over the summer.
A collaboration with our partners at Infosys and WongDoody was featured in “RISD’s Center for Complexity Partners on Translation Tool for ER Patients” and our collaboration with the Snowtown Research Collective was featured in “RISD Students and Local Researchers Shine Light on Rhode Island’s 19th-Century Snowtown Neighborhood.”
A heartfelt thank you to the RISD Research Assistants who worked with us last academic year: Deanne Fernandes (ILL) Angie Zou (ILL), and Ruchika Nambiar (GAC)! We continue to value the contributions of our fellows Dara Benno, Prateek Shankar, and Jon Soske who will be with us over fall at our new studios, now located at 68 - 72 South Main Street, on the 4th floor, in Providence.
Worth Reading
The Pedagogy of Kindness Thinking about how we go about trying to create a just society, this line from the essay sticks with us: “A fault-finding pedagogy has not made us kinder, for fault-finding does not really require the imagination, only skill. It is not hard to see that this fault-finding plays out mostly on the level of language—again, this is often about hierarchy, about those who have access to such a vocabulary and those who have not yet been tutored in it.”
Rewinding the Danube We have been thinking about the complicated idea of "nature" in the Polycene. This essay about a project to rewind the Danube Delta discusses the practicalities of an approach where, “Rewilding, by and large, means allowing nature to look after itself.”
The World’s Best Terrible Weather App Dark Sky is a beloved weather app that was recently shut down by Apple after they bought it. Dark Sky has a reputation for up-to-the-minute forecasts that turns out to have been unearned, given the rudimentary/terrible models used to generate them. This feels like a lesson in data-science-y vs science and the difficulty of evaluating predictions of complex models.