A Day in Boulder with Sophie Weston Chien
Sophie at home in front of a textile she made. Portrait by Maya Bennett.
Sophie Weston Chien is a designer-organizer: a practitioner and an educator who builds community power through social and physical infrastructure to ensure people can shape their own spaces. She is the inaugural Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow and a Lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder, Environmental Design Program. She is one-half of the collaboration just practice, a core organizer for Design As Protest Collective and Dark Matter U, and on the Board of Directors at DesignxRI. Her day involves a bus commute, warm-up design exercises, a hike, and tufting.
7:30am: I make a cup of coffee and heat up some leftovers for breakfast. I also let Truck, my roommate’s dog, out each morning. It’s been super warm here so I’m lucky to have breakfast outside today. Once I’ve cleaned up, grabbed everything and said goodbye to the house I’m out the door!
8:30am: Boulder is a fairly sprawling city with high car dependence but it also has a great regional bus system. I ride the bus to work each morning, which gives me a ten minute walk to the bus stop and a fifteen minute bus ride to think about the day ahead and check in with friends and family.
Students’ exquisite corpse dressers, courtesy of Sophie Chien.
9:00am: Class is in session! I am CU Boulder Environmental Design Program’s inaugural Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, which is awarded to scholars whose research, teaching, and service contribute to diversity in higher education. The one-year fellowship provides fellows with protected time for scholarship or research in preparation for a tenure-track faculty position. I was super excited to receive this fellowship, and on top of my research, I will be teaching two studios: Introduction to Environmental Product Design and Introduction to Landscape Architecture.
My students are coming in with a wide range of design skills, and so I like to lead them through warm-ups that get them drawing and thinking in new ways. Today I warmed them up by asking them to design an exquisite corpse dresser — each student designs one-third of the dresser and then passes it along. We then transition into informal desk crits. Their assignment is reducing car ridership in any form, allowing students to do site-specific observations and bring in their lived experiences while encouraging a range of products–soft goods, street infrastructure, mobility devices, and more!
11:30am: I have a break after class where I work through edits I received on an abstract. The research is on Cop City in Atlanta, trying to untangle and speculate on the project from an abolitionist perspective. I am using the project’s construction documentation to prove a breach in liability of the licensed design professionals, for a failure to account for slow, systemic violence that undermines individual health, safety, and public welfare of the surrounding community. It is research I started as my graduate thesis and continue to work on, figuring out how to implicate designers of harm and mechanisms for accountability when professionals behave badly.
12:30 pm: Today, I’m up to present my work for my Introduction to Environmental Product Design course! I start with my background and how I crafted my practice with a “counter-curricular” education on critical race studies and organizing. I also share examples of iterative design, by talking about the exhibition materials for Soft City, a collaborative project I worked on with Amanda Ugorji. We created haptic textiles that have been exhibited widely, and through each iteration refined how we explained the project through graphic materials. Developing different approaches for specific audiences is important for these students to learn, as they hone their storytelling skills through the design process.
Courtesy of Molly Dever and Jane Strode.
2:00pm: I have a zoom meeting with Kiki Cooper, a close friend and fellow organizer with Design As Protest Collective (DAP). The collective works to proliferate design justice and promote anti-racist principles in the built environment. Kiki and I are spearheading a new project—creating a series of DAP Chapbooks (a small, informal book that typically contains poems, stories, or lessons) around our 12 Design Justice Demands. We spoke about our larger ambitions for the project, our proposed timeline and questions to bring back to the collective when we meet later in the month.
3:30pm: While I’m working I get a text from my mentor, Shawhin Roudbari, that he has surplus tiramisu. Yes please! I met Shawhin through Dark Matter U, a sister organization to DAP, that focuses on anti-racist design education. Without this network, I would have never felt confident or supported enough to pivot from practice and start teaching! Shawhin invited me to apply for this role and has been a steadfast mentor and amazing thought partner. Individually and collectively, our work is housed in the Community Engagement, Design, and Research Lab at CU Boulder, which he co-directs.
4:00pm: Ride home on the bus. Checking social media, I am confronted with images of the genocide happening in Gaza. As I often do, I wonder about the role of design in witnessing the world’s atrocities, and how my design practice can hold space for trauma and grief.
The reason I wanted to be a teacher is to be able to explore ideas of justice and space without the professional pressures of clients and deliverables. I am still navigating what my role is in using my work to deliver justice for Palestinian people, and how I can move towards design action to stop genocide. How can images, spatial analysis, and other tools of design work for liberation? Forensic Architecture, Palestine Regeneration Project Forum, Léopold Lambert, DAARNA, and others have been working on these questions for a long time, and provide examples of ways to speak truth to power.
Boulder landscape, courtesy of Sophie Chien.
5:00pm: I am super new to Boulder, having moved here at the start of the academic year. Since I don’t know too many people, some of my friends have connected me to their friends who live here. In Boulder fashion, most of these meet-ups have been facilitated through hikes. Today, I’m meeting a new friend for an after-work hike in a park in South Boulder, near my house.
7:00pm: When I get back home I begin my nightly ritual: calling my boyfriend Rob and cooking dinner. He is based in NYC this year, so we have to do long-distance — terrible! Given our time zone difference, I normally cook dinner as he winds down for the day. Since moving to Boulder, I’ve been doing a lot more cooking, because I have more time and the food here is unseasoned. I’ve been cooking out of the Chinese cookbook The Woks of Life that my brother gave me a few years ago. Highly recommend!
Yarn collection, courtesy of Sophie Chien.
9:00pm: Since the sun has gone down, I take the opportunity to project and trace a new rug on my tufting loom. Tufting is an important part of my practice. I am working on a series of Ecological Communication Devices that use textiles to tell socio-ecological stories of sites. I have been experimenting with tufting the dry, arid ecology of the Front Range to get to know my new climate region. This will eventually translate into a larger project on migration, storytelling, and making homelands, but is in the sketch stage right now.
10:00pm: Winding down time! I end my nights quietly, watching TV (currently The OC) or reading (currently Ruin Their Crops on the Ground). I’m trying to balance media that helps me escape some of the horrors today with media that teaches and grounds me in a critical perspective. It’s not always an easy balance with the world as fucked as it is. As I fall asleep, I hope to dream of better worlds that we all deserve.