In collaboration with Chris Riley and his strategic insights and planning practice, Studioriley, I was delighted to help shape his response to Marshall McLuhan's seminal 1967 text The Medium Is the Massage/Mass Age—or as so many know it, The Medium Is the Message. (A printing error proved fateful, and resonant.) Fifty years after McLuhan ushered media studies into the zeitgeist, Chris wanted to explore a variety of topics "after the Mass-Age" of top-down culture: leadership, ethics, trust, and more. The result is a thoughtful, provocative reconsideration of our values and what it means to learn from instead of about our world. (Click here for more.)

Role: Editor

Blight Magazine is an annual publication created by the Collaborative Design MFA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art. For 2016, the fifth issue, "This is Public Space," examined the complexities of public space in Portland and beyond. NOTE: Blight was rebranded Radicle in 2017. The fifth issue's contents are now in archives; prior online layout/design has been changed.

Role: Web Designer and Editor, Publication Copy Editor, Contributing Writer

Tandemonium was a free-wheeling, all-ages adventure designed and presented as a part of the Incubate-Accelerate-Launch course, and as part of Design Week Portland 2017. Participants hopped on retrofitted bikes with sidecars for a trek through carnival-inspired games and "experience gazebos."

Role: Project Manager, with duties ranging from budgets and sponsorships to prototype and build-out timeframes, promotions, PR, and run-of-show.

As part of Howard Silverman's Applied Systems Thinking course in PNCA's Collaborative Design MFA program, Joel Newman and I were tasked with visually interpreting a report and book by Charles Heying (Associate Professor, Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University) on Portland's Artisan Economy. We imagined the nodes, boundaries, and local connections within the framework of an underground rail system in designing this poster.

Role: Co-designer and researcher

Activate the Block was a collaboration between PNCA's Collaborative Design MFA Program, Portland Parks and Recreation, Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, Better Block PSU, Design Museum Portland, and the Portland Bureau of Transportation in an effort to increase community engagement in the parking lot/upcoming North Park Block in front of PNCA's new location.

Role: Block 112 Coordinator and Stakeholder Liaison. Facilitated weekly stakeholder sessions between multiple governmental agencies, city residents, and creative and volunteer groups. The free community event was held as part of Design Week Portland in April 2016.

Sod It was an exhibition concept examining the social, ecological, and cultural landscape of the American lawn. Created by the PNCA MFA Collaborative Design 2017 cohort under the direction of Zack Denfeld.

Role: Copy Editor, Installation Designer of "Easter®: Branding the Green Carpet," Author of exhibition introduction essay.

PNCA Collaborative Design MFA students, during the course of instructor JooYoung Oh's Research + Insights seminar, conducted in-depth interviews with low-income parents and service providers from Adelantes Mujeres, APANO (Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon), and Black Parent Initiative. Our goal was to provide qualitative data about how a social sharing platform might help young, low-income parents overcome their isolation and connect with one another. The synthesized findings were presented in May 2016, in advance of the design session for the #EveryoneIn community partnership, sponsored by United Way.
 

Role: Design Researcher for Black Parent Initiative and APANO

The Long View was an homage to a Cultural Entrepreneurship course taught by the late Don Harker, and a call to action on the environmental conditions we face globally.

Buffering: The Art and Artifice of Climate Change
Video installation
Amanda Schurr, 2016
 

“As we approach the threshold of ecological catastrophe, the potential to establish a worldwide social movement — to bring about an evolutionary mutation in our current way of being — depends on finding a narrative, a mythology, that awakens the deepest yearnings within the collective soul of humanity.” —Daniel Pinchbeck and Schuyler Brown, “The World In a State of Extreme Transition”

The narrative—the mythology—of the moment can be found on two sides of the same spin[ning] coin: politics and showbiz. Election cycles, blockbuster tent poles, cheeky memes, viral shares, clickbait visualizations, doomsday and its denials are transmitted direct to the device, screens big and small. But this ain’t no scripted reality show. Climate change isn’t entertainment, even though the threshold of ecological catastrophe is the stuff of such, and makes for good drama. So where’s the narrative, the mythology, that will sell more than movie tickets, prompt more than click-throughs, trend more than hashtags—that will apply the “woke AF” ethos of now to a future that demands it most?

A collage of the messages bombarding and informing us—from Buzzfeed to the box office—Buffering considers the narratives we download and internalize on an hourly basis, and how we separate entertainment from reality.

[…buffering…]