A manifesto for studio community.
A (brief) recounting of my role in shaping the Carnegie Mellon School of Design graduate studio towards belonging and warm community.
I. A studio can be a cesspool of stress and loneliness
I remember the first time I ever set foot in the graduate studio at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design. It was student visitor day, spring 2018. I asked a current student at the catered lunch whether the students there had a sense of togetherness, to help each other through the stress.
“Not really.”
Fast forward six months, and I am in the throes of the most all-consuming educational experience of my life. Classes, homework, team meetings, pooping, eating, sleeping — the studio space was the all-consuming context of life. My body felt heavy with fatigue, and my heart heavy from group project turmoil.
In my program, the sixteen of us spent almost every waking moment together — discussing readings, working through team projects, providing critique. Our success, in many ways, was contingent on one another. And, in the midst of the chaos, there were moments where our cohort felt the intense strain of this interconnectedness.
As some broke down from burnout in a project we were assigned, we sat in a corner of the studio, attempting to work as a group to address deadlines. Like a car sputtering but not starting up, we kept articulating the problem, yet could find no solution. Conversation broke down into awkward silence. The meeting ended, nothing changed. We simply did not know how to be together.
The studio I entered that semester imagined itself in the same way that author Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing, frames higher education learning in late stage, neoliberal capitalism. It was our job to grow, like trees on a farm, in neat rows, and as tall as we can (and get a good tech job). In other words:
Everyone in the studio only looks out for themselves. We’re fundamentally competitors.
Many spoke to me in private of: crushing isolation, the intimidation they felt of speaking to others, the competitiveness of the other cohorts, how they (or others) weren’t good enough as designers. Everyday in the studio, you could see these micro-interactions play out — abrasive exchanges or exasperated teams. The pressure of job recruiters, school work, professors, school administrators, and our own expectations feed into (and perhaps created) this imaginary of stress and loneliness.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Some of us dreamed of a different way. Others often mentioned hopes for a different kind of student environment. (“Reclaim the space!” one friend always said, encouraging us to get wasted and dance on studio furniture.) I remember writing a speculative fiction in Molly Steenson’s seminar class in that first semester, wherein the head of the school set a warm and welcoming (instead of competitive) tone for students at orientation through a smudge-scented conversation circle:
“Every single one of you is here because you are an incredibly bright, thoughtful, and intelligent person. There is not one person admitted to this school that I’m not impressed by,” the Head of Design asserted, making sure to connect eyes with all of the subtly bewildered ones in the circle. The scent of the sage burgeoned. “I hope to ensure you are here to get what you are looking for; a space for mind-blowing conversation, intellectual discovery, and connection through creativity.” Some students couldn’t help but smile at the vulnerability on display. Others shirked and shriveled away from it, arms folded, staring at the golden brown wooden floor.
My speculation reflected my adoration of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, and Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly. These works provided a gesture of where one might go to gasp at belonging. And, with a slight excess of emotional wherewithal (relatively), I felt compelled to use these privileges and do something.
“We develop courage for those things that speak to our heart. Out courage grows for things that affect us deeply, things that open our hearts. Once our heart is engaged, it is easy to be brave.”
— Margaret Wheatley, in Turning to One Another
But, with just a few nudges…
The best way to describe what happened next is the gentle, satisfying nudge of a domino, triggering a beautiful cascade. Scratch that, it was like flicking a domino into the void, into unknown chains of dominoes awaiting in the darkness. Margaret Wheatley says that the only cure for despair is “knowing what to do.” But heck, taking the first awkward step in “knowing what to do” is damn hard. I started with the things I knew how to do.
Conversation: or, knowing how to talk to each other
In late 2018, I began asking friends in the cohort to meet together and talk about their stress. We had these conversations semi-regularly into the next semester, focused on reflecting on how we felt. In Turning to One Another, Margaret Wheatley identifies human conversation as the “most ancient and easiest way to cultivate the conditions for change — personal change, community and organizational change, planetary change.
Conversation is simple, yet profound because of the feeling it gives us: “If we can sit together and talk about what’s important to us, we begin to come alive.We share what we see, what we feel, and we listen to what others see and feel.”
It’s through conversation that communities become life-affirming places that we can feel a part of. Even more deeply, as community scholar Peter Block asserts,conversations that embrace the “language of connection and relatedness and belonging” help us feel at home with one another. I called conversations in the studio that helped us feel this way Town Hall.
As time moved forward, I became accustomed to the ingredients to a good Town Hall. In the end, the most important ingredient is the will to put it on at all, and consistently. I remember the first town hall in spring 2019 — the first with new folks. Nervousness gripped my stomach (it took till next semester for that to go away). And, the entropy of the studio — stress from heavy workloads, etc. — pulls on the likelihood that people “find the time” to attend. Many, many times I felt the need to call it off. But seeing the immeasurable joy the event brought those that did attend always made it worth it.
We build trust with one another, speaking to each other in the mode of listening, reflection, and care. I saw attendees cry with stress (receiving hugs and support), share personal stories, and listen to one another deeply. At times, I felt myself (and others) coming home. For all the stress and chaos surrounding us, in those moments, we felt alive.
Welcome party
In life, there are moments where the prevailing “order of things” is unmade, and we must remake it again. In our Transition Design seminar at CMU, we studied the multilevel perspective and called these moments “landscape shifts;” times when a new regime, a new way of doing things, becomes the norm. For the graduate studio, that moment regularly happens the first month of fall semester.
Every fall, with some students graduated and gone, new students enter the studio space, with their own expectations and fears about grad school. Meanwhile, they look to the continuing students for ideas about what the studio means, and what the social arrangements are. In fall 2019, I wanted a shot at redefining those arrangements.
When my cohort arrived at the studio the year before, we didn’t receive a warm welcome from the students themselves. We met some of the continuing students at a mixer organized by the administration. Otherwise, I awkwardly and nervously met the rest as they appeared (or didn’t appear) at the studio. Essentially, we were “thrown into” the studio space, with unsaid norms and values that haphazardly emerged as the stress of the semester unfolded.
This year, we would have a party. I remember texting the group of continuing students with trepidation whether they’d support my efforts. Several were excited at this prospect, with a couple actively helping me think through the next moves.
We crafted a slide deck that suggested that our success as a graduate community is fundamentally intertwined. Instead of a tree farm, we could imagine ourselves as an old growth forest (like those in the bioregion CMU resides within), in which trees survive by collaboratively sharing nutrients.
Through this slide deck, and the act of hosting a party itself, we were remaking the imagination of what the studio space was — or what it could be. Each student properly introduced themselves to the rest, shared their hopes, fears, and dreams. We shared food, made art. Metaphorically, the returning students took the new students into our open arms. This simple act made the rituals that followed — town hall, mentorship, and so on — less out of the question.
“Yes, and”
What came next was like watching a dance party emerge from a couple of drunkards dancing alone on the floor. We need the two drunkards (me and a couple of enablers) to get the party started, but later on every other dancer participates becomes equally responsible for holding down the floor.
One student started a Slack channel (that wasn’t dead this year), another student held conversations in their own cohort, others hosted parties, others still initiated an end of the year party (in the midst of the rise of COVID-19, which forced our end of semester online), many took the role of host of Town Hall. As Peter Block asserts, a community of belonging emerges from the small, everyday actions of people. Everyone, in their own way, held the floor with their own unique moves.
The nudges I initiated and the moves that came later are what I might call rituals of care, repeated everyday actions that help us shift and maintain our imaginations towards collaboration and collective resilience.
It can be a warm place of collaboration and inspiration
What was once a caffeine-fueled homework assignment may now (sort of be) a reality. We may still experience loneliness, feel fractured as a group, compete, or feel impostor syndrome — yet, something has shifted.
In my last semesters at Carnegie Mellon’s school of design, I worked quietly in the studio and I notice peers speaking to one another tenderly, joking around, making art and putting on the walls, doing small acts of generosity. Now, many spoke to me in private of: newfound camaraderie, the comfort they feel asking for help from others, the collaborative character of the cohorts, how they can offer something unique as a designer. We have a new imaginary in the mix:
Everyone in the studio looks out for one another. We’re fundamentally collaborators — we depend on each other’s success.
A community that fosters belonging can emerge because of one or two folks having courage to do something weird (and out of the norm), but it takes all of us to unfold maintain it. Even deeper, these lessons may speak to larger systems of social fragmentation —relevant beyond the privilege of higher education.
Thanks to my cohort mates (and professors) for helping this weird dream become true ❤.
