statement of creative activities and scholarship
throughout my creative and academic life, i have always drawn to the socio-political and idealistic. whether it be playing in punk and hardcore bands in my early days or discussing “cradle-to-cradle” ideas about materiality with students in my visual advocacy course, i have persistently been working toward a vision of what the world could and should be. that is what design is, at its heart – moving us from the existing to the preferred by showing us what could be. it is this creative act, focused on the collective good, situated strategically for maximum impact, that makes me love being a designer. in trying to have a bias toward action, i have often considered myself a maker more than a researcher but am leaning in to the connections between ideas and action, theory and practice, that can move both forward simultaneously.
through this introduction, i hope to provide context for my primary areas of focus in creative activities and scholarship:
the new programme
for around thirteen years, i have been continually developing and evolving the work i do under the moniker the new programme. i am most proud of this professional work – actively participating as a designer alongside labor organizers, lawyers, and people of faith who are working hard every day in service of those who are increasingly marginalized. i truly care about the people my clients work with and love seeing someone proudly holding a protest poster and being able to say “i made that”, in hopes that it gives them a credible voice directed to those in power. i have been deliberate in the mission and values i embody within this work, all the way down to the language acknowledging my clients and student interns as "collaborators" to instill proper thinking about how we ought to be working together as flat, networked teams. further, it is important that this work be steadfastly local and that i have shared interest with my collaborators, whether it be geography or ideology.
one goal of the new programme has been to widen its scope of influence through including student interns, which i have been able to do with some regularity. since 2012, i have worked with ten students who have been invaluable in assisting with and creating this work. i have recently committed to paying them out of the meager funds i make from paid work, which is difficult but satisfying.
freelance and consulting work
this section is very brief on my cv but constitutes a good amount of time and effort over the years and is worthy of mention. it is a mix of projects done for friends and acquaintances, work not included in the new programme portfolio, and opportunities for interesting participatory processes.
the most recent work included here, though still in its infancy, concerns a new collective effort called “counteragency”, undertaken with julia cole, jean schmitt and jacob canyon, among others. we were awarded a kcai faculty development grant to develop the communications platform for this in 2017. i am still working out what it means to be involved in both the new programme and counteragency, as the values and end goals are very similar. the latter has definitely afforded me the opportunity to work out ideas of true collaboration and collective decision-making within the context of social innovation projects, even though they have been small to start with.
scholarship
this area is predominantly a mix of talks, conference presentations, and more recently, workshops and has largely been focused on design for social innovation and issues of design pedagogy. i am most interested in how ideas related to communication theory such as rhetoric and modes of persuasion might translate into “design action”, allowing the propagation of ideas in a grassroots way. in terms of teaching, i have recently become strongly interested in the notion of the inquiry method as a mode of self-directed learning and working out how that fits in to a standard institutional structure that favors discipline-specific approaches for their relatability and sell-ability to young creative minds. the ideologue in me says that there will be learners interested in design-focused ideas but that they should be allowed to follow their interest wherever it might take them. the in-development practice of this is exemplified in a few recent courses at the university of kansas and kansas city art institute and presentations [here and here] about the ideas and outcomes of those courses. there is still a long way to go to the effective realization of these ideas, initially formed by postman and weingartner in their book, “teaching as a subversive activity” but i am excited to continue developing them in my current academic context.
exhibitions
as a designer, i recognize that the highest forms of both art and design essentially do the same thing – reveal essential human truths in profoundly memorable ways. that said, i am largely drawn to “designerly” ways of getting at that – focusing on audience, context, shaping a message and helping others to communicate. for that reason, building an exhibition record is not a big priority for me and not where i find the most satisfaction in making work. that said, i have participated in several juried and invitational social/political poster exhibitions and an art exhibition specifically dedicated to political ideas. a more traditional art-making context is an opportunity for me to practice expressing a viewpoint that is solely mine and to play [fun being a key factor here] with levels of coded form. my initial play with the informational diagrams in “the instructional series” as exercises in absurdity and humor have transitioned into attempts to build meaning and commentary using that language. in that process, they have become more closely linked to my larger body of design work. my most recent piece, “how to kill the planet in three easy steps” links ideas about sustainability, self-expression, photoshop as a collage tool, and the “visual comparisons” workshop co-authored with colleague lisa maione. kcai and its surrounding community affords multiple exhibition opportunities that i welcome as an alternative way of making and thinking about issues that are important to me.
the role of the university of kansas
while there are many great aspects to being embedded in the highly focused arts culture of kcai and kansas city, i feel i would be remiss if i did not mention the role that the university of kansas played in the development of my scholarship and its connection to my practice and the classroom. in retrospect, ku's teaching load, considerable resources in faculty development, and their “center for service learning” were very helpful in providing the time and space for me to quickly develop more sophisticated ideas about the value [and difficulty] of long term community projects in the classroom, working actively with community partners, publishing and exhibiting student work, and disseminating ideas about the new programme and the inquiry method. even though university life ultimately did not feel right for me, i greatly appreciate having the resources to accomplish what i did, in the two years i was there.