On Learning: Design Brigade Week 11
A project co-sponsored by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media and Atelier Cho Thompson. For more information, visit Design Brigade.
Latest Progress
As of the last week for Design Brigade: On Learning, the objectives for this week are to prepare a launch plan as well as a distribution package for future distribution, and to further facilitate NXTHVN with bringing our guidebook into their programming.
Distribution Package
As a part of the exiting materials, the distribution package includes a batch of imagery (8 images for social media, 4 images of representative pages in the book, and 4 images representing the project), a demo video of the guidebook and briefs of this project with different word counts besides the final version of the book to make it convenient for launching this guidebook.
NXTHVN
After our conversation with Jay from the NXTHVN Apprenticeship program last week, we were particularly excited about the possibility of developing their collaboration with photographer Janel Shabazz into a long-term, regular community program. The initial idea for the collaboration was to have the apprentices work with the photographer and have a photoshoot in New Haven, but the conversation evolved that idea into a social history project where the apprentices reenact or recreate historical photographs of different New Haven neighborhoods according to their own interpretation. On Tuesday, we delivered a facilitation package which includes a list of suggestions for ways to adapt our existing models in the guidebook into the photoshoot project, a compilation of prospective community partners that share similar interests with the apprentices, and a community survey template. Furthermore, we documented the process of NXTHVN working out the plan as a case study of bringing the guidebook to life.
Launch Plan
The team also had a productive conversation with Daniel Fitzmaurice from the Arts Council on Thursday. Daniel has been very involved in the making of the guidebook, and we have taken his advice including involving institutions that are not necessarily arts-related around New Haven as well as developing a virtual launch for the guidebook. This final meeting with him focused on ways to distribute the guidebook after its completion. We were also excited to know that the Arts Council will feature the guidebook on their website, and will continue to promote the guidebook to their external organizations and other art institutions.
As this week is the official end of our internship, we strived to finalize the project in terms of distribution materials as well as facilitation for the implementation of this guidebook. In hope of seeing the guidebook being carried out in New Haven by our community members in near future, we came up with a Collect-and-Share format that collects the latest progress plus needs of help from the program partners on a regular basis and shares it to all partners, so as to make productive connections between partners, and facilitate the “team working” among partners in an open manner. Besides NXTHVN’s thrilling progress, we are excited to hear from Melissa on this Friday that Beinecke is coming up with a lot of interesting ideas, including designing a new curriculum for youth around rare books and manuscripts, inviting people to use facsimiles of items in their collections, and creating kits for personal/family archiving. We are so looking forward to the prospective activities carried out by our clients for kids in New Haven, and we as always respect how much effort and dedication they put into this program!
Jessica
The past six weeks of working on the Design Brigade: On Learning project has been one of the most fruitful and pleasant experiences I’ve had in my design career. Aside from the amazing opportunity, I’m also super grateful for my team members that have set up an amazing foundation for our project before I joined the team. Throughout the project, we were given tremendous freedom in exploring the directions to take this project, which really made me reflect on the ways that I’ve been approaching design problems as an architecture student, and to think deeper about the architectural discipline in terms of its conventional teaching on investigation, research, and analysis.
One of the most important messages from this experience is the common yet unaddressed disparity of resources that is present in our communities. Anjiang and I got on board with the project as a collaboration between YSoA and Design Brigade, meaning that the original On Learning team has been working on or initial research and developing the project for more than a month prior to this point. As I was catching up with the project in my first week, I was overwhelmed with the amount of backstage community outreach that our team had been doing, including interviews with community partners and conversations with focus groups as well as professional advisors. As I suggested that this research section requires a bigger presence in the guidebook, I was surprised by how little I know about the new Haven neighborhoods and how much existing knowledge shared by community leaders has not been shared more broadly.
My unfamiliarity with the neighborhoods and community voices speaks to the main issue in the current design field: the dismissal of community voices and the lack of listening in the research phase. In light of the recent social movements as well as the pandemic, the public starts to recognize the inequity that’s been present in our cities, but there are a lot more actions that need to be taken before the situation can start to change. When working towards design solutions for local communities, the team also noticed the invisible disconnection among institutions in New Haven, namely the individual creative, the governmental and Yale affiliated institutions, and the organizations that are in need of financial and creative support. We tried to advocate for an infrastructure that allows more transparent communication among all parties in New Haven, but I believe that essentially, the change needs to start from our understanding of design solutions and positive changes towards equity design. After initiating the conversation about equity and justice in design culture, the design discipline as a whole now needs to continue this discussion in real-life projects.
When implementing our clients’ suggestions and feedback into the guidebook, the nature of this book as a mediator and a guide also made me aware of my limitations as a designer and an architect in a sense that’s more real than ever. On a daily basis, I was confronted with questions like “Is this the right thing to suggest? Am I delivering the voices from the community in a truthful way? How much should we try to cover, and how much can we achieve in practice?” I eventually made peace with this struggle and understood the constraints we have as architects — we will never have the amount of control as we would like to have, so we need to make suggestions in ways that are most beneficial in the long-run. In the context of the guidebook, we revised our language throughout the book to really prioritize the importance of listening and communication. What we need is more conversation, more initiatives, and more openness towards change when things need to be done differently now.
Anjiang
The internship in Design Brigade for me has been a series of the most condensed conversations & collaboration I’ve ever had since I first set foot on this foreign land one year ago. Compared to the occlusive academic life at school I’ve been living in, the working experience in this program gave me a dynamic and vibrant vision of the people, the culture, the language and the mindset in New Haven to lift my understanding on how people are actually LIVING here. Aiming to be a socially and environmentally responsible architect, I always admire those who genuinely care about the people that are going to live in what they create for life, and who sagely react to people’s needs, but not just cast off a selfish symbol of personal expression to appropriate the land irrelevantly. What I learned most through this internship is that the hardest yet the most unignorable part of design is to think BEYOND oneself.
During the process of making the guidebook, my teammates, our clients, the advisors, and individuals from the neighborhoods taught me with their civil ways of thinking from others’ perspectives and taking on the responsibility for the bigger self — the community we all live in and live with. Not just advocating for one’s own needs, they care for the vulnerables, observe, understand, empathize with their situation, and prioritize the task of facilitating in the bigger picture. It is amazing to think about how Design Brigade and our clients got together for the same purpose in the first place, and how more potential participants are being involved to fulfill the same mission. They are far beyond simply talking but actually taking action that made the guidebook as well as other ongoing processes happen.
The biggest regret I had is I didn’t get to listen or talk more with individuals from the neighborhood, or physically visit the neighborhood in depth to visualize the daily picture of people’s life. While doing the Map of Voice in the guidebook, I realized we didn’t hear enough demographically or geographically from the people we are eventually serving. Since the undertone of the book is on relationship building, trust, equity, and sustainability that we try to achieve should be built up from the first step — listening.
In the end I want to thank my teammates and mentors, for taking me in this team and creating such a great structure and environment for team working. In terms of personal growth, besides my language skills that have been thoroughly exercised through countless meetings, documenting and thinking, I learned so much from the systematic workflow which I feel amazed to make this virtual collaboration work so well, and was happy to see the smiley faces of everyone making fun. When I was about to make a presentation in front of the whole Design Brigade team, Kayley, Soomin, Robbie and Jessica all cheered for me with a poster background, making me feel roasted but loved with their encouragement received. I will always treasure this piece of life and carry all the goods I learned from this internship to more people I meet in the future.
