Meet Me in the Middle
September 25th
As the debut event for the STEAM Pavilion, which was created in collaboration with Providence-local Pneuahus and Brown STEAM over the past year, Brown STEAM led a workshop for the 2015 Better World by Design conference, titled “Meet Me in the Middle.”
Better World by Design is a student-organized conference held annually at Brown + RISD that facilitates collaboration between designers, educators, and innovators. The theme this year was access.
Jonelle Ahiligwo ’16 and Kenji Endo ’18 led the workshop, which focused on the ways the physical structures and spaces we meet at can influence the conversations we have within them. The workshop used the STEAM Pavilion as a starting point to discuss the design and use of physical interdisciplinary, inclusive meeting spaces, ones that can create a point of access from different disciplines for exploration in a ‘middle,’ ‘neutral’ ground.
During the second half of the workshop, participants split into small groups to imagine some meeting spaces of their own. Half were given a hollow object (e.g. tubes, bottles, basket), and tasked to imagine what sort of function that form could take. The other half were given a purpose (e.g. dancing, play, studio), and tasked to consider what potential forms could achieve that function.
After a share and tell of the particpants’ innovative responses of the above prompt, we concluded the workshop with the encouragement to challenge the existing uses of spaces and be more flexible with how we use physical structures every day.
While we had trouble with projecting on the bright white wall of the newly-born STEAM Pavilion, it was incredible to see people interacting and enjoying this new space, which will hopefully become an ongoing meeting space for STEAM as a community.
See more images of the STEAM Pavilion on our Facebook.
