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As part of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem at the University of Maryland, we had the unique opportunity to present our work during the 2024 Deshpande Conference, which was being hosted at UMD. But how do you tell the story of eight years (and running) of work that has evolved over time and is primarily concerned with process, but has also produced a diverse, and at times niche, body of work? One idea was to put together an exhibit - featuring lots of different stories! And ideally, mounting the exhibit in the Clarice would draw conference attendees out of their typical environments of offices, classrooms, and maker spaces, and get them thinking about how they might translate their work into new or different contexts at their own institutions.
As we began thinking about how we might really invite participants into the work of the Studio, it was clear that static images and text, alone, wouldn’t capture the spirit and joy of the work. Former Innovation Studio member and DesMuse collaborator, John Horzan, came back to help us remount some of our stand-out performances from over the years, with a full-wall video of the Carrot Revolution performance from 2022 and an updated version of the Grieg performance from 2019, complete with current NOI fellow who performed live for the conference attendees! And in true Innovation Studio fashion, we of course had activities for participants to engage in throughout the exhibit.
Our design skills (that we engage the fellows in too!) storytelling, prototyping, and making things with simple materials were stretched in new ways. Much of our day-to-day work involves a smaller, and scrappier, scale than an exhibit that’s supposed to fill a whole black box theater! As enthusiastic makers, figuring out ways to work at this new scale and resolution was a fun challenge, and we even discovered some new workspaces and tools available on our campus!
Even though we had tons of stories to share, or perhaps because we did, we quickly learned that mounting an exhibit was more of an undertaking than we had initially realized. But it was a challenge worth facing! We learned a lot through this process, but three takeaways that really stand out are:
It was also a really fruitful invitation to pause and really look back at (and make sense of) all of the work the Studio has done and all we’ve learned over the years – something that’s always important to do, but can be hard to prioritize making the time for! Finding ways to put the impressions and instincts we’ve developed into words and share them with others forced us to really clarify them for ourselves, even if doing so didn’t always end up with a neat “story arc.” In fact, taking this zoomed-out perspective of our work really revealed how messy, interconnected, and relational it is – which is actually what we value over linear (often over-simplified) processes, even if it can be harder to talk about.
Sharing this work with a completely different audience than usual (innovation and entrepreneurship educators, rather than orchestral concert-goers and NOI superfans) was a great reminder to check in on our assumptions and bring in other viewpoints. The questions and discussions that emerged with exhibit visitors were really amazing feedback for us - both for how we talk about the work, and the work itself! - and helped us make new and different connections between the work of the Studio and our wider work as design and innovation educators.
So much of our work is about celebrating the ideas and learnings of the students we work with. Changing the lens to think about our own ideas and learnings was a space of “productive struggle” for us, and we learned so much about our own work throughout the process…though we’re not necessarily champing at the bit to mount another exhibit anytime soon 😉
We really are so grateful for all of the incredible collaborators who have generously contributed their time, expertise, ideas, and enthusiasm to this work over the years. We would not have had eight years of work to look back on without them, and we are so delighted to continue this work from here.
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