The Emily Carr DESIS Lab is hosting an information meeting for students interested in getting involved.
Please join us Monday, September 26 from 11:30 – 12:15 in the DESIS Lab (Room 3150) to speak to lab coordinators, hear about recent projects, and find out how you can get involved.
You can also join via zoom:
https://emilycarru.zoom.us/j/88084106310?pwd=N3VxeXUzZEVMWDdUS3Z2bFpaSUVtUT09
Meeting ID: 880 8410 6310
Passcode: 348007
Hope to see you there!
Louise, Laura and Helene
In coordination with the International DESIS Network, the DESIS Lab at Emily Carr is pleased to host an DESIS Cafe event:
7:00 am* (Pacific) / 14:00 UTC, Wednesday, September 21, 2022
Room will open at 6:58 am to coordinate with the Vancouver sunrise – we will begin at 7:00
View DESIS Cafe Recording (65 min, Youtube)
This discussion includes ongoing and collective work staying with sustainability; positionality and place; project sharing and an open discussion:
How can we continue to stay with sustainability; to form understandings for working with the natural world?
Share a coffee, knowledge, and experience with all DESIS Labs. All are welcome!
Marcia Higuchi, Zahra Jalali and Kimia Gholami
Part l
Facing our current socio-environmental crisis, we can recognize the damage to the Earth caused by modern human society and the capitalist structures; often by overlooking our relationship with more-than-human beings. It seems to be more than urgent to challenge human-centred values, and perceive a More-than-Human perspective that asks:
“How can we create more sustainable ways of living by accounting for more-than-human knowledge, agency, and collaboration?”
Facilitated by Marcia Higuchi, Zahra Jalali and Kimia Gholami (MDes 2022), and hosted by Emily Carr DESIS LAB, a workshop took place at Emily Carr University in March 2022, aiming to encourage participants to practice reflecting and creating with More-than-Human beings as their Creative Partners. As part of the facilitators’ graduate theses, the goal of this workshop was to investigate our relationship with the MtH world; how we interact with them, relate to them, learn from them, and how we can act responsibly towards them.
This workshop had been broken down into three main parts
On the day of the workshop, as participants entered the room, they encountered a big table filled with rocks, leaves, sand, seawater, etc. who were our More-than-Human guests. Before getting started, they were prompted to choose one of the beings as their creative partner for the workshop and were encouraged to hold their MtH being during meditation as well. The meditation guided participants to get to know their MtH partner through their sensory and tactile experiences and reflect on their memories or previous encounters with them. Afterward, participants shared personal stories about why they chose a certain being and what they discovered from them as they held them during the meditation.
In the second part, participants were asked to write down their understanding of their MtH partner on the paper by using empathy maps, as a way to learn how much we know or do not know about them. Filling out the empathy maps and thinking about feelings or thoughts of More-than-Human beings was challenging for many. However, the group was creative in their approach and ended up with varied ways of expressing empathy and relationality for their MtH partner. After discussion, the group concluded that there is power in acknowledging contradictions and accepting our lack of knowledge of the MtH world. This exercise also helped us recognize more-than-humans as beings who have unique life experiences, histories, and interactions.
Part II
In the final part, the participants were presented with a range of making materials to choose from. All materials were driven from natural resources. This prompt was focused on the act of making as a way of freely practicing reciprocity and creating in collaboration with an MtH partner. Some chose to make symbolic offerings: a water slide for the seawater, or a container that held the soil (since the soil usually supports and “holds” other beings). Others recreated the forms and shapes of the beings, as a way of learning and being guided by their MtH partners.
In the end, we discussed how having space for exploring with MtH beings as collaborators encourages experimenting and active learning without having to worry about a potential “design” solution. Everyone engaged and related to their MtH partner in their own unique way and contributed to the workshop by embracing the unknowing. In the end, the participants left their makings behind so all the beings could be brought back to where they were found, and the materials to be recycled. Leaving behind the makings was another attempt to acknowledge how we were not to “own” any of the beings or the creations but to encounter them, collaborate with them, and part ways.
Images by Yun Xiao, 2022
DESIS faculty are pleased to share a series of special topics courses in the summer of 2021:
Bi-scriptual Typography (COMD 350) will explore the relationship between language, typography, culture and diversity in the context of contemporary communication design. Through a combination of discussions, readings, informal exercises, out-of-class activities, walks and observations, students will explore the possibilities of working in an inter-lingual and inter-generative space of communication design. In particular, students will explore how an idea can be expressed and modulated across different languages, scripts and cultures. A series of projects will draw upon past learning in typography and communication, with students expected to investigate various ways of gathering, assembling and analyzing visual materials and urban typography. [Reyhan Yazdani]
Decolonizing Design’s Material Practices (INDD 350) This exploratory, interdisciplinary, course invites students to reconsider assumed prototyping strategies and production processes commonly used in Design. Drawing on insights from decolonial scholarship and applying embodied making as means of reflection, students will identify and consider their own individual affinities for particular aesthetics, materials, and modes of assembly. Collectively they will propose and develop strategies for delinking from aspects of material practice that bolster longstanding and arguably problematic colonial/modernist strategies embedded in Design and the design process. Asking: how do we do? why do we do? what is needed? The aim of this investigative summer studio is to find new ways to make – meaningfully. Insights from this body of work are intended to be shared with the Emily Carr Design Community – to seed further ongoing iterative development of new Design approaches that directly address the concerns of our time. [Hélène Day Fraser, with Marcia Higuchi]
Practicing Neighbourly Responsibility (CCID 201, 301 + HUMN 300) Learning within the context place – that is, within active social, institutional and ecological dynamics on unceded territory – how might we collectively determine our learning space; critique and trouble hierarchical and exploitive structures; and take up the work of neighbourly and place-based responsibility? Drawing from mutual aid practices – responding to the immediate needs and concerns of a community, in conjunction with social movements demanding transformative change – this class is intended to be emergent and responsive, extending over the summer to better respond to needs and pace of community work, taking up the following questions:
[Jean Chisholm, Laura Kozak, Mickey Morgan]
Outdoor Practices (INDD 350) This roving* field school will take Emily Carr students to local green spaces to engage in a range of design activities that supports wellbeing, attention to nature, place-based making, and openings to land based practices. Making outdoors can inform us of our relationships to the natural world, but a practice outdoors will inherently impact everything about our way of life. Including the decisions we make and the designs we continue to privilege in our day to day. Dirty hands, wet knees, deep observation and a panoply of sensory experiences will be encouraged. Sitting, walking and movement practices will be explored. Students will create many projects, that may include earth art, Earthbound Prototyping, Design for Biodiversity**, and storytelling/story-sharing. Students will be given the opportunity to work beyond the disciplines of graphic, industrial, and interaction design. Collaborative projects are encouraged, but optional. [Zach Camozzi]
* with gratitude to the ECUAD collective, the Roving Designers for this framing.
**a long-running project of the DESIS lab, see posts on Project pages
The Emily Carr DESIS Lab is pleased to announce a 2021 award to a group of students for the formation and initiative of the Place-Based Grad Collective.
Place-Based Grad Collective
Melanie Camman, Christa Clay, Angela Dione, Avi Farber, Marcia Higuchi, Shankar Padmanabhan, Chiara Schmitt, Charles Simon, Garima Sood, Pat Vera, Julie Van Oyen; facilitated by Laura Kozak and Jean Chisholm
Formed in 2021, the Place-Based Grad Collective is a flexible network of design researchers assembling around a shared set of approaches to place-based design research. Specifically, this work looks at our responsibilities, reciprocities and commitments to the land that we live on, and forms emergent projects that actively respond to the needs of the people and systems around us.
In trying to understand what kind of infrastructure is useful or necessary to support this work, we aim to explore a model that can coalesce and disperse when needed, embracing the spirit of a collective: a flexible network of people with independent practices converging to respond to and create a shared experience or intervention. Through exploring, enacting, and connecting place-based approaches to collaboration, we are attempting to move from scattered fragments of siloed disciplines and projects, and black-boxed, bureaucratic hierarchies, towards a networked mesh of emergent grassroots relationships, knowledge and capacity sharing, and action. Together we are asking:
How can we as individuals and also as a collective take up the responsibility of contributing to the places where we are?
What needs to be done, and what can each of us offer?
This collective came together as a part of the research project Place-Based Responsibility.
Melanie Camman is an interdisciplinary service designer and researcher. She has 3 years of experience working alongside social service providers, anthropologists, and social scientists to rethink programming and delivery of social services, as well as, the structures of service organizations. Researching social issues and working alongside people who have been marginalized led her to return to school as a masters student to study coloniality and decolonization in design research and ethnography. Her current explorations include using textiles, making and workshops as a way to tell and share stories and create community engagement. Melanie currently works as a Research Assistant for the Fibreshed Feild School through the Shumka Centre. Outside of school you will find Melanie snowboarding in the local mountains, growing food and plants for textiles in backyard and gardens, or curled up on the red chair with a podcast and a knitting project.
Jean Chisholm (BA, BDes, MDes) is a designer, researcher, and educator. Her research explores place-based design practices and community collaborations that work towards relational, ecological and equitable ways of living, and has most recently been published through PDC 2020: Participation(s) Otherwise. She has experience as a graphic designer and art director, designing and overseeing production for printed, spatial, and digital touch points. Jean currently teaches at Emily Carr University.
Christa Clay is an MDes student, research assistant, and co-founder of the Place-Based Materials Lab at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, BC. She lives, works, and plays on the unceded, ancestral lands of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her practice is place-based, incorporating her experience in food, farming, and ceramics with natural material research that prioritizes the role of communities and their economic self-reliance. Christa is originally from the land of the Tonkwa, Lipan Apache, and Comanche peoples, known also as the state of Texas, USA. She graduated from the University of Texas with a B.L.A., focusing on International Relations and Global Studies (2017). Christa has called British Columbia home since 2018.
Angela Dione is a mother, designer, researcher and maker situated on the unceded Coast Salish Territory of the Tsawwassen, W̱SÁNEĆ, the Stz’uminus and the Hul’qumi’num Treaty. Her research and practice-based explorations focus on natural materiality in craft and design with an additional interest in working with children in a place-based approach. With her background in woodworking and ceramics, Angela investigates the act of making within the context of natural materiality. Through this work, she uses traditional techniques as a connective tool between human and non-human living co-design and as an investigation of our connection to place. Angela studied at the Högskolan för Design och Konsthantverk – The Academy of Design and Craft at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) where she was completing her MFA in Child Culture Design. She is now pursuing her MDes at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada.
Marcia Higuchi is a communication designer and researcher from UNESP, Brazil. Her research is focused on which ways design can empower children’s ecological wisdom and political agency as future stewards in the environmental crisis.
Through a dialogical and reflexive approach, she aims to investigate the importance of storytelling, sharing how our own personal experiences brought into a broader understanding of our social relations, can affect our sense of interdependence and belonging to nature.
In her first year at Emily Carr, Marcia developed a series of cross-DESIS workshops that included participants in both the Emily Carr DESIS Lab (Vancouver), and the Rio DESIS Lab (Rio de Janeiro) who were invited to engage in a activity with their children and register their experience trying to listen to a more-than-human being.
Laura Kozak is a designer, educator, organizer and mother living and working on unceded territory Coast Salish territory. With a focus on relational ways of working, she has built partnerships and collaborated on projects with artists, designers and organizations since 2005, including Access Gallery, 221A, the Aboriginal Housing Society of Prince George, the Vancouver Park Board, and the City of Vancouver. A core interest in place-based design, systems of reciprocity and exchange and locality informs her research and teaching practice. She holds a Master of Advanced Studies in Architecture from UBC (2012) and a BFA from Emily Carr (2005). She currently teaches design in the Jake Kerr Faculty of Graduate Studies and is a Research Associate of the DESIS Lab and Shumka Centre at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Morgan Martino is an interdisciplinary designer, researcher and facilitator, whose work focuses on building and supporting communities that can foster caring relationships, critical learning, and informed social change. Morgan’s current research practice explores how everyday material culture and designed systems inform and reflect our complex relationships to care.
During her career as a student of Industrial Design and Social Practice + Community Engagement (SPACE) at Emily Carr, Morgan has had many opportunities to foster her community practices. Through the creation of small communities such as the Mixtape Collective and Vintage Digicam Club, Morgan aimed to recontextualise perceived obsolete technologies as tools for artistic expression and alternative media engagement.
In 2020, Morgan collaborated with Naomi Boyd to be a part of the Shumka X DESIS Satellite residency, where she was able to co-develop Pocket Change; a series of workshops centering the pocket as a lens to help unpack wicked design problems. Most recently, Morgan created the Roving Designers, a place based design collective exploring how to engage in design work outside of traditional studio contexts. This year, Morgan has acted as the Undergraduate Coordinator for DESIS, helping to communicate the values and goals of the lab and invite other students to become involved in its work.
Chiara Schmitt is a product designer, maker and design researcher focussing on material-driven explorations in craft and design. Through her work, she explores areas of sustainability by dealing with natural materials and resources in the field of material speculations. With a strong interest lying in their perception and sensation, her practice touches on the agency of social responsibility and sustainable behavior. Having completed her BA at the University of Applied Sciences Schwäbisch Gmünd in Germany, Chiara is now pursuing an MDes at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
Pat Vera is an architect, designer and researcher whose work focuses in incorporating Indigenous knowledge and alternative epistemologies into land-based design and pedagogy as a way of building sustainable futures with practices that already manifested in an equitable, respectful and balanced relationship with the earth.
Pat’s current research promotes the Pluriverse as the space in which to converse among different worldviews, creating community-oriented design practices that can work towards healing from the systemic damage caused by the colonial matrix of domination.