StudioLab helps NGOs and non-profits collaborate using transmedia knowledge and strategic storytelling.

This 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 through Cornell Cooperative Extension and 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?

• Us Undivided: Across the nation, political polarization divides people and communities: how to articulate values we share as humans that bring us together – rather than the things that drive us apart?

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.