History of the BDW

Brown’s creative culture has long been a place where students have translated their ideas into projects that have real impact on the world. But until fairly recently, there hasn’t been accessible, inclusive spaces where students from across campus could prototype and critique their projects. The Brown Design Workshop emerged from a vision amongst faculty and students to make Brown a place where students interested in design could find the spaces, community, and academic resources to fully actualize their creativity and interest in design.

"There was always this question at the end of the semester when I was teaching 'DesignStudio' and 'Strategies for Creative Process',” says Lecturer Ian Gonsher. “What do I do now? How can I study design? My answer was usually a ‘Hmm... maybe go take a class at RISD? Take an art class?’ Get involved with some of the student groups like Better World by Design? There weren’t really satisfactory answers to that [question]." Gonsher had been teaching these classes, nurturing an early culture of design at Brown at Tockwotton Studio, at the invitation of the Visual Art department, but there was a growing need for a space and community on campus where design could thrive. These early experiments with design curriculum led to conversations and the eventual creation of the BDW in early 2013.

Faculty were seeking to provide space for build projects across the university and to integrate design into the Engineering curriculum. Clyde Briant, recently transitioning back to teaching after administration, sought to respond to student desire to learn engineering and integrate it in:

I just try to encourage students to use this space for different things—I’d like to see it involved with other courses in engineering, see a continuous program through the first two years, see people engaged in this space.

I was in industry for a long time and it’s never [as] simple [as a single correct answer]. You’re always making trade-offs and making decisions—if we do this, and this, well… it’ll cost less and you won’t be done or vice versa and [you're] thinking about all the constraints. [...] In design, even if it’s a fairly simple project, you do get this idea that there are a number of solutions, [some] better of those, or the best, but [all] not necessarily perfect.

The spirit of the BDW has been DIY from day one. Founder and former director of the BDW, Chris Bull, remembers this, and was prepared for further growth early-on: 

We didn’t have any money, so we had to do it ourselves. We were able to get hand-me-down tables and stuff and I had a little money [from scrap] and I bought some chairs. People gave me a hard time about those chairs. "Why [did] he buy so many chairs?" It’s because I had a vision of what this place might be, and I knew that soon enough, we would have the right number of chairs for the place!

Ultimately, the BDW stands to exemplify how Brown students explore design, "not as a method, [but as] a mode of inquiry," says Ian Gonsher. 

Where we can do things differently, where we have potential to be leaders, is in the creativity of our students and the way they think about problems in the world. The impulse to do good in the world, that design can be an agent for change. If we can tap into that and make that concrete, we have lightning in a bottle. On top of that, we have this resource of RISD, one of the best design schools in the country.

Brown students are so amazing and if you give them the opportunity and if you give them the skills and the space and the resources to do things, they will do amazing things.