Partner Projects

DEMO projects build on Prof. Jon McKenzie’s StudioLab pedagogy for design and engaged media. Students co-design with non-profit and non-governmental organizations in the US and abroad.

• Black Farmer Fund: To reconceive wealth beyond financial and intellectual capital to include social capital and ancestral wisdom, can Black farmers build wider community?
• Her Whole Truth:  Survivors of violence are especially vulnerable to being punished with “a living death sentence”: can sensitive, holistic storytelling help commute their sentences?
• Health Access Connect: A small successful non-profit, HAC has for years used “boda-boda” or motorcycle taxis to help Ugandans access low-cost healthcare: how to share their experience as the staff helps scale up their work across Africa.
• Black Belt Citizens Fight for Health and Justice: The “Black Belt” region across Alabama and other states has suffered social, economic, and environmental injustices that has affected the lives of generations: can their stories help bring justice?

 

Teams & Guilds

StudioLab’s collaborative matrix empowers students to interweave design interests and skills. DEMO members work in teams and guilds, enabling you to balance interests in specific design challenges with honing particular design skills. Members can go deep or wide in either or both: the key is interweaving challenges and skills.

Design Challenges

• Healthcare – From the delivery of basic care to epidemic vaccines to mental health and disability services, public health campaigns have led knowledge translation between specialists and communities for over a century
• Society – Overlapping private and public life, social issues of class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and ableism challenge all individuals and organization to engage with multiple stakeholders and values
• Economics – From innovation and social entrepreneurship to economic equity and alternative economies, critical design thinking offers models and practices of collaborative production and shared evaluation of work
• Environment – The world presents design challenges beyond any one discipline, indeed, any one species, system, or environment, calling forth contemporary practices of transmedia knowledge and pluriversal design

 

Design Roles

• Process design – Strong conceptual and analytical skills, as well as synthetic, storytelling and poetic skills
• Media design – Strong aesthetic and content creation skills, media production across different platforms
• Technical design – Strong building and programming skills, experience in modeling and rapid-prototyping 
• Strategic design – Strong collaboration and team-building skills, experience managing partner relationships

 

Critical Design Cascade

StudioLab’s Critical Design Cascade expands on the role of shared media in design thinking research, aligning it with the performative values of cultural efficacy, technical effectiveness, and organizational efficiency and three related transformations: becoming-makers, becoming-builders, and becoming-cosmographers or co-dreamers of worlds.

Designers

DEMO Officers President – Megan Chang, ’23 Vice President – Benjamin Yeo, ’23 Chief Operating Officer – Amanda Mihovilovic, ’23 DEMO Faculty Advisor Jon McKenzie, Director of StudioLab, Professor of Practice, Literatures in English, Faculty Affiliate, Bronfenbrenner Center of Translational Research