Four ongoing research projects by faculty and recent alums focus on composting, improving the visual data used to drive climate research, sustainable biomaterials and tenants’ rights.
Interdisciplinary Projects Earn Backing from RISD’s Somerson Sustainability Innovation Fund
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RISD designers have long been focused on research initiatives promoting planetary health and sustainability. Today that focus is taking a turn toward interdepartmental and interdivisional collaboration and the sharing of successful tools and techniques with scientists and climate activists outside of the RISD community.
Industrial Design Professor Charlie Cannon, for example, is working with food researcher, writer, and RISD alum Rini Singhi MA 22 NCSS on Scaffolding Success, a podcast series using financial support from RISD’s Somerson Sustainability Innovation Fund (SSIF). Named after President Emerita Rosanne Somerson 76 ID and endowed by alum and former trustee Sarah Sharpe 94 GD, the fund provides substantial grants for transformative research projects involving collaboration with external community partners.
“Complex cross-sector collaborations—especially environmental and climate initiatives—often fail because of the challenge of organizing transdisciplinary teams,” says Cannon. He is part of the international Evidence in Practice (EIP) Project, which has been studying and documenting the frameworks and agreements that enable successful cross-sector collaborations in the field of international development. The group’s findings were published in Administrative Sciences Quarterly in 2024, and Cannon is currently working with Rodrigo Canales on Scaffolding Success: How Collaborative Innovation Can Solve Wicked Problems, a book on the topic for MIT Press. Singhi and Cannon are planning to use their podcast to bring these findings to a wider audience.
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The podcast will also collect and publicize successful cross-sector environmental and climate initiatives from around the world, analyze the strategies that made them successful, and link them to the frameworks and agreements identified by EIP. Episodes in the works include Getting Started, Making Decisions, and Staying Engaged, and a group of advisors including RISD faculty, staff, and alumni are helping to identify important topics for future episodes.
In RISD’s Glass department, Senior Academic Technologist Eliza Potenza has earned an SSIF grant for a collaboration with Associate Professor Doris Moencke, who teaches in Alfred University’s Inamori School of Engineering. The goal of the project, she explains, is to adapt regionally sourced, recycled container glass for use in studio-based glassmaking.
“This material is more climate-conscious and cost-effective than the specialized glasses currently in use, which rely on newly extracted raw ingredients and carry a significant carbon footprint before they ever reach the hands of artists,” Potenza explains. “Working with glass will always demand energy, but adapting recycled container glass for studio use offers a tangible step toward reducing negative environmental impacts.”
“Working with glass will always demand energy, but adapting recycled container glass for studio use offers a tangible step toward reducing negative environmental impacts.”
Potenza intends to use SSIF funding to support chemical analysis, thermal characterization, and recipe development to modify samples from RISD’s stockpile of material. The goal is to improve melting temperature, working time, clarity, and color.
Also receiving SSIF funding this year, designer and alum Tanmayee More MLA 25 is working on a project called Fire Fossils: Biomineral Infrastructures in Untangling Climates that will allow her to apply the interdisciplinary material practice she developed at RISD to the problem of worldwide wildfires. “As a designer whose work is poised between the earth sciences, materials science, and structural design, I seek not only to understand this profound inter-relatedness, but to apply it to infrastructures that address the challenges of wildfire,” she explains.
The conceptual basis of her proposal evolved during her thesis year as she experimented with biomineral infrastructures and was inspired by a “forest glass” recipe to use wood ash to lower the melting point of silica sand. She discovered that the chemical conditions of these experiments mirrored that of wildfires, creating unique opportunities for infrastructural resilience in the cascading conditions of fire and flood associated with these landscapes.
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The forms created, she explains, would act as check dams (or barriers that slow down the flow of water) in subsequent floods, trapping sediment, percolating nutrients, and preventing seeds from washing away, and thus regenerating the forest and preserving habitats. She is currently refining the material recipe of these infrastructures, conducting kiln tests, and preparing to test them at prescribed burn sites in Rhode Island.
Where More’s project brings together glass and landscape architecture, another SSIF-funded project in the works headed up by fellow Landscape Architecture students and alums focuses on bringing diverse youth practitioners into their chosen discipline. The project builds on the work of a collective called BRACKISH, formed in 2022 by Corey Watanabe MLA 24 and Naomi Canino MLA 24, whose goal is bringing landscape-inspired educational workshops to underserved area youth. For the past two years the collective has been stewarded by Mary Ritchie MLA 26, Julae Tan MLA 26, and Meeghan Truelove MLA 26 and is now being guided by Ritchie, Dongchen Wu MLA 27, and Gabrielle Gehler MLA 27.
“Complex cross-sector collaborations—especially environmental and climate initiatives—often fail because of the challenge of organizing transdisciplinary teams.”
“With funding from the Somerson Sustainability Innovation Fund, we will continue our biannual series of hands-on workshops with Groundwork Rhode Island’s Green Team and also build out the scaffolding for BRACKISH’s next phase of work,” says the team. “We center our efforts around the urgent sustainability issues of climate justice, including coastal resilience, ecological collapse, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events.” They will also disseminate project outputs via social media, a newly developed website, and a biannual print publication.
The collective sees the work as a critical path to advancing inclusivity in the field of landscape architecture. “And landscape architecture is inherently interdisciplinary,” BRACKISH adds, “touching on such topics as ecology, biology, design, history, politics, culture, and more. At its best, it helps to create a more livable, equitable, and just environment for all.”
Top photo: The goal of Eliza Potenza’s project is to adapt regionally sourced, recycled container glass for use in studio-based glassmaking.
Simone Solondz / images courtesy of the awardees
July 16, 2026
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