Local Cultures – Global Spaces
Abstract
By their nature, interdisciplinary design studios suggest combining different perspectives – tearing down the silo’s walls and questioning familiar models. There is also the matter of building connections, new associations, and awareness. Reimagining how we think, play, relate, and work. Tearing down and building simultaneously. Being an interdisciplinary design studio focused on community-engaged projects within a public research university on an urban campus gives the design studio access to intersecting issues at different scales – the studio, university, and city communities, and beyond. The studio partners with a local non-profit design center so faculty and students can access a range of community members beyond the university. These projects engage students in small teams over a semester. Their challenge is to help their community partner wonder about the possibilities while delivering thoughtful, creative, relevant design strategies that address diverse needs. The studio’s ethos, processes, and participants co-create a dynamic, fluid environment for learning and teaching. The unfixed nature of the studio challenges studio members to question the influence of factors such as project types, team relationships, and acts of collective versus solitary making. By focusing on selected projects from the past year, we can consider how by working small and local, we understand big and global.
Emily Smith is an assistant professor of Interior Design at VCU where she focuses on material studies and immersive design studios. Her commercial project experiences have ranged from residences to airports with a passion for community-engaged projects. She has worked with design firms across the United States and developed new domestic and international study programs for VCU. She co-leads an interdisciplinary design studio, the middle Of broad studio, through VCUarts. Smith holds a BS from Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University.
With over 25 years of industry experience in various contexts and regions, including New York, New Delhi, and Mexico City, traversing a broad range of markets and competencies – design, public relations, production, and development, Jeannine Diego’s extensive creative practice informs her research as well as her focus on sustainable design. She is engaged in design innovation projects with Mexico’s traditional textile makers, centered on fair trade practices and participatory design processes, in addition to spearheading the Sartorial Studies research program at 17, Institute of Critical Studies. Her areas of interest lie at the intersections of fashion and politics, as expressed through the self-making practices (dressing as narrative, making, mending, crafting) of undisciplined bodies, particularly in Cuba and Mexico. She has taught courses in fashion theory, and her research, which has been published in peer-reviewed journals, has also found expression in documentary film projects. She serves on the editorial board of Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty and is a member of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion (UCRF) as well as some of its subgroups focused on sustainable practice and policy. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design and a Master’s Degree in Critical Theory.
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Thursday 7th December, 2023