Seung Mee (Judy) Lee

This two-year project is the product of a partnership between The New School, Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (WHEELS), and The Fortune Society, along with Working With People (WWP). Drawing inspiration from Kay Ryan’s We’re Building the Ship as We Sail It , the project engaged with two questions: What does it mean to make a thing for ourselves? and How do we tell our own stories? The collective determined what they would make as they got to know one another, rather than privileging one voice over another. This meant that the design work had to be more reactive than proactive and that bias and preconceived notions had to be teased out and dealt with. The participants spent the first semester getting to know one another, the second semester identifying needs, the third semester prototyping chosen ideas, and the final semester polishing the concept to bring it to its final form. New School students designed tools to facilitate the collective work. These tools were developed on the basis of observations, questions, and needs that emerged during this process. The samples here offer a glimpse of the intricacies and nuances of this project through artifacts and photographs of the contexts in which the tools were created and used. In the course of two years of work, project participants developed friendships and expanded their worldviews.