The work of our studio is always expanding. The latest? Doctoral research.
Myriam’s Ph.D. work about how Black, Indigenous, People of Color cope and thrive in their kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms.
*Read the full article on my publication, Our Everyday Forms, made just for sharing my Ph.D. work.
What is my Ph.D. about?
In short, I’m sitting in my friends’ living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms and sharing how we take up space. Literal space–through the objects and spaces around us. Sitting there and talking and showing each other the stuff in our homes is what gets me pumped about my Ph.D.
Where am I doing the Ph.D.?
It’s a bit of a long story, but if I make it to the end (three years — my personal goal), I’ll be graduating from Monash University’s Art Design and Architecture department in Melbourne, Australia. The university is Monash, the department is design, and the program where I sit is called Wonderlab. The other thirteen candidates of the program are a mix of people who live and work on their Ph.Ds full time on campus and the other half are all over the place from Sao Paolo, Mumbai, San Francisco, and other places. We all meet once a year in Melbourne. And we all meet again another time in the year somewhere else to fairly balance out the energy and money it takes to get to each other. My primary supervisor is Gene Bawden (brillant expert on ‘home,’ among many other things), and Lisa Grocott ( brilliant expert on learning and how to ask questions, among many other things) is my secondary supervisor.
The Wonderlab program is directed by Lisa Grocott, a former professor of mine in grad school (The New School, Parsons) and mentor and friend.
1 Project Title
Our Everyday Forms: Learning to cope through displacement and marginalization
2 Research topic outline
Our Everyday Forms documents and catalogues the coping mechanisms displaced and marginalized individuals have constructed for themselves. The work is about unpacking the tacit knowledge and de-institutionalized methods individuals learn to use — both in a one-off ad hoc manner, and steadily across generations.
3 Preamble
In 2015, I co-founded a design consultancy and lab for Emotion-Centered thought leadership, Matter–Mind Studio. The crux of our practice is developing and refining our inventory of methods and tools for Materializing people’s emotional needs. Our client work has ranged in the contexts of violence prevention, health care, and public health to technology, design, and organizational culture. My teaching in Pratt Institute’s Master’s in Industrial Design (MID) program uses speculative design and participatory design methods through a social justice lens to critique the role of the designer as problem-solver and to re-imagine the criminal justice system. My independent research takes the form of a public website that collects and archives coping strategies and encourages the process for Black, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer, Non-Binary, and Trans People of Color to “decolonize themselves and to unapologetically take up space.” The work that is foundational for all parts of my practice is a peer-reviewed work done across two years in MFA Transdisciplinary Design at The New School. I demonstrated a new process for design through a thesis that addresses a particular intersection between cognitive science theory and the materiality of design through practical application in a clinic-based family therapy program.
Each arm of my design practice since 2012 has consistently been contributing to my understanding of the ways people learn to cope and most recently has been galvanized into understanding trauma-informed coping strategies.
4 Project Description
Our Everyday Forms is most influenced by a few things including bell hooks statement, “To enter black homes in my childhood was to enter a world that valued the visual, that asserted our collective will to participate in a noninstitutionalized curatorial process,” the story Teju Cole tells about James Baldwin and how Baldwin “had to bring his records with him [to Switzerland] in the fifties, like a secret stash of medicine… to keep him connected to a Harlem of the spirit,” the multi-generational, trauma-informed coping strategies Dr. Joy Degruy identifies through her work on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, Elaine Scarry’s writing on the topic of pain and justice, and lastly the discourse around oral histories, indigenous and vernacular architecture, linguistic dialects, and how they’re each valued and devalued. Each of these illustrations are about how displaced and marginalized groups of people maintain their identity and cope in the context of, as bell hooks puts it, “white-supremacist-capitalist-imperialist–patriarchy.”
The everyday coping through white-supremacy that marginalized and displaced Black, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer, Non-Binary, and Trans People of Color must do manifests itself through the way we manipulate physical space around us. There is evidence individuals are very fluent at doing this. What does this look like? What forms does it take? What patterns might emerge from cataloguing these coping mechanisms in this context?
How might we use material thinking and design-led research to take care of this kind of ‘coping knowledge’? What might we understand about learning from conducting this research?
Our Everyday Forms “will highlight design’s capacity to make tangible, to make visible, to make do and to make happen. Experimenting with designing learning resources this project will operate at the nexus between visual communication practice and co-design methods to explore where material thinking meets design thinking.”
In this project, the experimenting is specifically focused on learning resources for the design practitioner and the design process itself, as opposed to designing learning resources for participants. This project critiques and does not seek to ‘give participants agency’ or to ‘make solutions.’ This distinction I’ve made is important for the challenging and exciting work of embodying the principles that found this project — to subvert existing structures of power and authority. Instead, this work contributes to the discourse about design as a means for understanding, not solving. Therefore, a significant portion of this project will look retroactively and catalogue how individuals have form-ed sophisticated coping strategies and practiced learning-through-making themselves. “The emphasis here is on experiential, material knowing and how the two come together to create spaces of learning” within and for the field of design.
The case study to explore Our Everyday Forms may include Black, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer, Non-Binary, and Trans People of Color living in New York City.
