Presented at the #140edu conference in New York City, August 2nd and 3rd, 2011

Immersed in a constant stream of information, losing our ability to meaningfully read anything longer than a page, and connected through a social network that in users represents the 3rd largest country in the world, how can we promote thoughtful and sustained education 140 characters at a time? If our tools are also those which our accelerating our lives, how can we subvert them to slow us down? If our students are encouraged to write, only bits at a time, how can we engage them in sustained thinking and writing?

I would like to promote slowness as a value for educators to promote through technology. Is slowness a useful concept for educators working with technology to consider? Have we lost our ability to slow down in learning? Furthermore, do educators and designers of technologies feel a responsibility to comment on and demonstrate alternative technologies that may promote slowness and considered thought?

As an educator, artists, and technologist, my talk will present the current landscape of fast thinking and multi-tasking and proposes a manifesto for slowness via which I believe we can return to the essence of education – to give our students the skills to become lifelong learners, and to sustain interest and inquiry into a variety of fields.

The audience at #140edu is the perfect one with which to engage in this dialogue. The fact that we are participating in such an event means we are interested in education and in technology. I also believe that most participants in educational technology conferences believe that technology can bring positive change to education. I would like to disrupt this thinking a bit, by highlighting the downsides, while returning to the positive via a new framework, slowness.

Lawson’s process is comparative to that of the Hubble Telescope, in which different black-and-white images that capture various colors are combined and applied to a color processing system to fashion something that can’t be seen by the naked eye. As with the Hubble, the human limitations of time and space perception require the presentation of such facsimiles to perceive the imperceptible — and physical labor on the pieces add to that.

Exploring the literal definition of nook, each work captures a few seconds of NYC street corners via layered photographs which are backlit.  The boxes themselves hold the images in a curve that draws from the curb of the city’s corners (softening the usual imagined 90-degree nature of a corner.)  The bases on which they sit are meant to be airy pedestals, giving the spotlight to these small urban spaces (and which glow as floating screens at night.)

A special thank you to Lorena Kraus for her assistance assembling the work, and Shaun Kasperbauer and Toshimasa Fukaya for their design and fabrication of the bases and boxes.

Exhibited at

Art Lot
206 Columbia St., Red Hook, Brooklyn
September 12, 2010 – January 9, 2011

Abstract
Under the umbrella terms of “humanitarian design,” “social design,” and “social responsibility,” educational institutions and specifically design programs are more and more searching for opportunities to engage their students in critical and hands-on learning via collaborations between students, faculty, communities in need, and non-profit organizations. Such active learning is rich and meaningful for all parties involved, but the challenges are rarely discussed and yet compromise the collaborations’ sustainability and potential for activating local change and development. This article uses the first two years of “The New School Collaborates,” (TNSC) an ongoing project between The New School’s divisions of Parsons (design), Milano (non-profit management and urban development) and General Studies (international affairs), in New York, several external partners, and groups of Mayan artisan women in Guatemala, as the central case study for the abovementioned type of work. Of particular interest is the central role that organization and communication play in immersive international field programs. This article argues that the key to a successful collaborative process includes a clear and transparent partnership upfront; with a clear understanding of the roles and opportunities for each organization involved, and a communication infrastructure that is sensitive to participants’ skills and resources. The article refers to, and includes, documentation from specific experiences from two years of courses on campus as well as in Guatemala, and the overall process and evaluation of this particular case. Of particular interest is a reflection on challenges faced and how an active, and thoughtful analysis of them, can lead to a more appropriate, and in the long-term more sustainable structure for this type of work.

Keywords
humanitarian design, social design, social responsibility, sustainable development, artisanship, craft, international education, collaboration

This book was self-published with support of a generous grant from Parsons The New School for Design.

The preview below shows 29 of the 64 pages in the book.

Click on this screenshot to see a preview online and contact me if you would like to purchase a copy.

BOOK LAUNCH
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
6:30-8:00 p.m.

Parsons The New School for Design
2 W. 13th St. Ground Floor
Orientation Room (behind the bark wall)