The call for the 2018 Catalyst workshop was to develop design practices that are more people-centric working directly with people from diverse communities around the world to develop design interventions that strengthen the interconnected and complex, socio-ecologic relationships that matter to them. The workshop sought to solve real problems affecting social, environmental, and economic conditions largely unmet by the profession, and to expose students to opportunities for design intervention that are not apparent in more conventional design practices or traditional design studios.

The call for the 2019 Catalyst workshop was a focus on artifacts and the idea of Architecture as a Socio-Technical System with even simple design artifacts link to socially constructed contexts, components of much larger technological systems that actively shape the societies that produce and/or use them. Social anthropologist, Tim Ingold points out that theorists and critical thinkers, “make” through thinking, while craftspeople and builders, “think” through making. As designers bridging these worlds, producing concepts, theories, and artifacts in our engagement with communities, clients, and the built environment, the 2019 Catalyst was intended to create a critical discourse around the practice of “making” as it relates to design and architecture, and to engage in the production of artifacts with communities to address ongoing social and environmental challenges. The production built on the work of the 2018 Catalyst bringing back the communities we worked with last year to “make” something together. The focus was on the development of a significant prototype with help of an extended community of practice that we will engage to transform and develop the catalyst inquiries.