StudioLab helps NGOs and non-profits collaborate using transmedia knowledge and strategic storytelling.
This Spring ’24 StudioLab course connects critical design teams with researchers, activists, and community stakeholders. Practicing methods of research translation, design thinking, and participatory action research, students collaborate on projects with community organizations in the US and Africa:
• Digital Equity+Excellence: Across the country, COVID has exposed the lack of access and equity to basic digital services: can a youth media campaign help democratize data and cyberinfrastructure in schools and communities and connect to wider social issues?
• Health Access Connect: A small successful non-profit in Uganda, HAC has for years worked with remote Ugandans to access low-cost government healthcare services: how to share their knowledge and experience on such work across Africa?
• Singular XQ: An exciting start-up nonprofit is exploring a software development framework that addresses sustainability more adequately. How to design multimedia artifacts to illustrate the research and the framework itself?
• 14BC Gallery: A new art gallery in NYC’s East Village seeks to connect different communities through exhibitions, installations, and performances. Can hands-on workshops in zines and artists books forge bonds between different generations of makers?
• StudioLab: Critical design thinking and transmedia knowledge have applications far beyond higher education and offer all sorts of designers and organizations new ways to reframe their work. Could StudioLab alums help recast its mission?
Consulting on partners’ ongoing projects, teams study and practice critical design drawing IDEO’s Design Thinking and Stanford’s Design for Extreme Affordability, as well as tactical media and organizational developed by ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, and contemporary, multi-platform campaigns. Teams present and share their collaborations via project site and other platforms.
Part of a multi-year Civic Storytelling project to translate StudioLab into practices, policies, and infrastructures of different disciplines and institutions in order help democratize digitality, the class and workshops are supported by the Society for the Humanities’ Mellon Rural Humanities Initiative, Einhorn Center, and a Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellowship, with support from the Department of English and the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research.
Zine Workshops at Newfield High School and Cornell University
This term all teams participated in part of a series of zine workshops by Brooklyn artist Owen Madigan organized by StudioLab at three locations: Newfield, Ithaca, and New York City.
On March 13th, StudioLab hosted zine workshops by for Newfield High School classes in English Language Arts and Sociology. Students drew and wrote handmade, analog zines shown at 14BC Gallery.
Owen also gave a workshop to StudioLab design teams at Cornell University on March 15th. Here we made one handmade zine and several digital zines and posters which were exhibited in NYC.
Owen’s last zine workshop was held at 14BC Gallery in NYC’s East Village on April 6. Participants created handmade zines using cut-out photos, crayons, and collage materials. Zines were displayed as part of the show.
Zines, Memes, PAR&D @ 14BC Gallery, NYC
All teams also created and curated content for StudioLab’s first design exhibition, Zines, Memes, PAR&D: Participatory Action Reserach & Design, at 14BC Gallery in NYC’s East Village.
The exhibition features a Great Wall of Projects documenting co-design projects by some 130 students and 15 community partners.
The exhibition features a Great Wall of Zines showcasing artist Owen Madigan’s recent work and zines from his workshops at Newfield High School, Cornell University, and the East Village.
The back wall monitor showed over 30 Make Media! videos on different transmedia forms, from comics to Pecha Kuchas to pop-up installations.
StudioLab plans to do another design exhibition next year, along with another set of workshops.
Research Presentation
Research based on this class and other StudioLab projects was presented at the “After Tragedy” Performance Philosophy Conference, May, 2024, in Austin, TX.