RISD Hosts Forum for Community Exchange During DESIGN WEEK RI

How can collective creativity, collaboration, and conversation surface new ideas, reveal connections, and open pathways through complex questions? A recent event cohosted by RISD’s Academic & Creative Partnerships and Center for Community Partnerships invited creative thinkers from across the state to collectively explore that question in relation to a series of ongoing, community-focused research projects.

Part of DESIGN WEEK RI 2026, the informal gathering built on a conceptual framework inspired by artist Lois Weaver’s Long Table methodology and Stephen Turk’s idea of “tabling ecologies.” Weaver sought to disrupt the traditionally hierarchical panel discussion by welcoming participants to the proverbial and literal table. Turk, a scholar and architect, expanded on the idea in his investigations into the relationship between choreography and architecture and its rendering in digital space.

Provost Touba Ghadessi welcomed participants to the event. “The partnership between DESIGNxRI Design Week and RISD is evident—together we create, together we learn, together we design a hopeful future for our communities,” she said. “The plurality of ideas brought through thoughtful and open exchanges expand RISD’s core ethos through disciplines and across institutions in inspiring ways.”

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A shifting cast of students, faculty members from RISD and Brown, and local designers sat at the table sketching and enjoying refreshments provided by Amos House More Than a Meal catering, an organization that provides second-chance opportunities for Rhode Islanders. Then the first pair of facilitators took the floor: transdisciplinary designer Dara Benno MID 22 and fellow alum and Terra Carta Design Lab Competition winner Felicia Neuhof MArch 24. They passed around samples of the materials Neuhof is creating out of discarded mollusk shells and shared project updates about her Shellf Life startup.

Neuhof sees her function in the process as one of translation and asked the group to consider the role of the translator in a general sense. One participant noted the importance of historical knowledge in creating possible futures and saw translation as a kind of intergenerational information exchange. Another suggested that the ultimate role of the translator is removing points of friction.

Next up was an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Brown’s Elemental Media Lab and RISD’s Architecture, Furniture Design, Interior Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Literary Arts and Studies, and Sculpture departments, who picked prompts from a hat on the table to get the conversation rolling. The hat posed such questions as What have you noticed recently that you don’t yet know what to do with? What can we learn together that none of us could learn alone?

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The conversation turned to classroom culture, the practice of care, and the benefits of maintaining a nonhierarchical structure when teaching and learning. Assistant Professor Naimah Petigny, who teaches in RISD’s Literary Arts and Studies department, referenced a poem by Lucille Clifton called Won’t You Celebrate with Me that ends with the line “come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.” How do you mediate between care and disillusionment, one participant asked. Where do you find the passion and engagement to keep yourself going?

Members of RISD’s Teaching + Learning in Art + Design department gathered around the table next for a celebratory group discussion about the just-released, online Rhode Island Histories in Action professional development series connecting K-12 educators with art, design, and local history. Funded by a US Department of Education grant procured through RISD’s Center for Community Partnerships and developed by Assistant Professor Caitlin Black, the project was built around the Providence print shop where master printer Jacques Bidon and educator Marco A. McWilliams collaborate on a community-based Black history and poster design course called Letters in Liberation. 

“I left the corporate world to do this work,” Bidon told the group. “I wanted to create something that was lacking in my own childhood and to give kids the tools they need and then leave them to their own devices.”

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Later in the day, Industrial Design Professor Charlie Cannon and Rodrigo Canales led a session on transdisciplinary collaboration, drawing on scaffolding practices from their forthcoming MIT Press book Scaffolding Success: How Collaborative Innovation Can Solve the World’s Toughest Challenges. Cannon is now developing a companion podcast, supported by the Somerson Sustainability Innovation Fund, with alum Rini Singhi MA 22 NCSS, founder of dhoop magazine. 

Another session at the Chace Center invited the community to reflect on the new wayfinding strategy recently implemented at the RISD Museum, taking participants through the multi-stage design process from initial concept to final implementation. Participants weighed in on the challenges of creating cohesive design systems within a complex institution, the role of user testing, and the importance of designing with visitors’ needs in mind. 

Director of Academic and Creative Partnerships Katherine Cooper describes the day as a whirlwind of interconnected experiences and productive discourse centered around a shared question: How can art and design help us better understand—and better shape—the communities we inhabit? 

“Partnerships are how RISD’s approach to art and design reaches beyond campus, and this event brought local partners, students, faculty, and staff together to take on big cultural, social, and environmental questions,” they add. “Today’s conversations gave us a starting point for ethical shared inquiry and new ways of working together.”

Simone Solondz / photos by Matthew Watson 09 FAV
September 21, 2026