Our project is a five year, multi-phased, experimental design studio that integrates living and working, exploring new models of design practice. Each year, the studio will inhabit a different location with changing geographic and material conditions, and the work produced will respond to these changing contexts. Projects will be disseminated through a publication series, website, and exhibitions.The practice will operate under a different name and a different set of parameters each year. The name adopted each year also describes the work created. The years and studio names in order are: Connections, Encounters, Impressions, Recursions, and Reflections.

The first year is called Connections, and is conceived as a radical beginning. We plan to move to Joshua Tree, California and build a studio practice from scratch, using available materials and craft to re-connect with the natural world and engage the local community in a series of workshops and interventions.

During the second year, Encounters, the studio becomes nomadic. Travel by foot, bicycle, bus, hitch-hiking, and RV, are peculiar ways to encounter places and people and create a fabric of relationships. Engaging with various communities on the move, the work produced will embrace chance, narrative, and mobility.

The studio broadens and deepens this nomadic methodology in the third year, Impressions, operating in 4 countries for a period of 3 months each. By engaging with communities outside of our own cultural contexts, the resulting work will necessarily incorporate local vernaculars, national differences, and outside collaborations.

In the fourth year, Recursions, we will partner with a larger, established design firm, operating as an agency-within-an-agency. Investigating issues of scale, management, and what it means to be an “agent” within an existing organizational structure, the work produced will respond to the concrete needs of the larger company and offer unsolicited proposals and scenarios that challenge typical ways of working.

The final year, Reflections, will archive and disseminate the work produced during the first four years. A publication and website will be completed documenting the entire practice for the larger art, design, and cultural communities.