HCIL’ers at the Phillips
A review of the 2019 HCIL retreat.
What is the HCIL? Where is it going? What is our vision? Who are we as a community? There’s one annual occasion for discussing such existential questions and engaging in a bit of festive strategic planning: our fall retreat. As annual retreats go, the 2019 one can be considered an unqualified triumph of creative event planning and community building by HCIL’s newly minted coordinator (Beth Domingo), director (Niklas Elmqvist), and professor and troubadour (Jonathan Lazar).
Senior Associate Dean Brian Butler led the strategic planning portion of this year’s retreat, which addressed space (not the outer kind, but square footage, architecture, etc.) and the future as we march through the next 5–10 years beside the iSchool, on its inexorable expansion into ever vaster and more attractive floor plans. Brian conducted our collective vision quest with the sagacity of a venerable shaman, the panache of a Hip Hop D.J., and a mastery of group dynamics matching the highest echelons of corporate consulting.
A further miracle of group dynamics was performed by Jonathan in getting the whole room to sing along with him two classics of mid-twentieth century protest music, This Land Is Your Land and the MTA Song.
The centerpiece of the day’s adventures was an art scavenger hunt at the Phillips Collection, a few steps away from the retreat venue, the UMD Center for Art and Knowledge. Our name tags each sported one of seven images of Phillips Collection paintings.
Teams were formed of HCILers with the same painting on their badges; our mission: find our painting in the collection and compose a meme to accompany it. Here’s the winning meme:
After all our defenses had been melted into ecstasies of communal warmth by community building, song, and a lovely buffet lunch, we orchestrated several rounds of research speed dating. Only time will tell how many Fearless® projects will arise from this, from which we may expect mewling litters of newborn grants and monographs in the years to come.
And, finally, we each summed up the day in three adoring words, collected here:
[1]: We were indeed happy, but were we as happy as Renoir’s boaters? Or would that be crossing a line?
