Afterthought: Designing Nourishment, Nourishing Design

Welcome to our event: Panel On Designing Nourishment, Nourishing Design!

Date: Sat May 04 2024

Time: 3-5:00PM (Eastern Daylight Time)

Location: Design for Social Innovation (Floor 5)

About the event: How can we craft experiences that beckon us toward profound wholeness and fulfillment? In what ways can design prioritize nourishment above mere consumption, fostering mindful engagement? What if we measured success by the nourishment our creations provide? By examining the convergence of food, justice, and community development, we'll immerse ourselves in the firsthand journeys of out-of-the-box thinkers, designers, and facilitators who are crafting experiences that nourish the souls of New York City. Come join us for an exciting discussion on the intersection of **design** and **nourishment**.

Our Panel:

• Zacarias Gonzalez is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, from the Cuban diaspora. Food has been one his central themes and mediums and in his work. In 2022, they were recognized by the Basque Culinary Institute and World’s 50 Next for their work in activism within the food space specifically their project auxilio experimenting with how food can be used to reinforce community through collective practice the project created an intersectional, community-based, food-centered space providing resources, nourishment, and support for queer, black, trans, and indigenous communities of color in New York City. He created multiple unique partnerships and worked with local farms to operate a monthly food distribution program across all five boroughs free to subscribers and individuals living with HIV. Some of their recent works have been in collaboration with MoMA, MoMA PS1, Pioneer Works, Sky High Farm, Oko Farms, Recess Art and guest lecturing at SVA and New School Eugen Lang on colonialism and our global food system. His practice centers on reimagining ways of care, food, migration, and creating a place within our communities that initiate a paradigm shift and joy.
• Lisa Chau is a California native with Chinese-Cambodian roots. She has an educational background in urban planning and sustainability, and her career journey has spanned various sectors including food and hospitality, environmental nonprofits, event production, and social impact. Through her role as an Associate Director of Program Management at Purpose, Lisa has helped operationalize strategy, campaigns, and creative projects tackling a wide range of social issues such as climate change, racial equity, public health, migrant rights, and voter mobilization. For over a decade, Lisa has been working on Chauing Down, documenting her family's recipes and stories of surviving the Cambodian genocide and immigrating to the U.S. She plans to publish this into a cookbook to share the unique flavors of Chinese and Cambodian cuisine as well as the rich history of her family's experience as genocide survivors, refugees, and members of the Cambodian diaspora. With the cookbook, she hopes to raise awareness to our world's current refugee crisis and generate funds for relief efforts for the millions of displaced communities around the world. An avid home cook, food is one of Lisa's primary love languages. She finds food to be a powerful means of connection and storytelling and regularly brings people together around a meal. Through her multifaceted work, she hopes to create a positive social impact by melding her diverse experiences across multiple disciplines. Follow along and chau down with her @chauingdown.
• Jasmine Pierik is a dot connector, guided by the belief that we hold the answers to each other's problems. Fascinated with the mechanics of how and why we gather, she's experimented and deepened her practice as a designer and facilitator through producing hundreds of gatherings in the last decade from music/food/art/wellness festivals, to Fortune 500 networking events & galas, to neighborhood art therapy-storytelling experiences, DIY workshops, supper clubs, weddings, office concerts, and everything between. She currently heads up the Art Program at The Yard and is a freelance experience designer & riffing partner for small businesses & entrepreneurs. When she isn't cuddling her cat or upcycling thrifted finds, she's bringing loosely linked guests and unexpected questions to the table at her monthly supper club.
• Mari Nakano is a designer, systems strategist, and educator who has been practicing what design can do for products, services, and teams in the social impact space for over 15 years. They are currently focused on building a practice centered around relationship and community-building, food justice, sustainability, and planetary repair, spending part of their time as an adjunct faculty and thesis advisor at the MFA Design for Social Innovation Program at the School of Visual Arts as well as a project coach for graduate students who are part of the Social E Lab under the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Mari served for 5 years as the Design Director at the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (NYCO), where they built strategies to help scale design thinking and strengthen community engagement and participatory research practices across the City. They led NYCO’s Service Design Studio Team, which aims to build up the capacity of government colleagues who are focused on tackling issues around poverty and inequity to understand and apply service design methodologies to improve services, programs and processes through evidence-based, user-centered and creative approaches. Prior to this role, Mari served as the Design Lead for UNICEF’s Office of Innovation and focused on building the first full team of designers to support data scientists, engineers, and country program officers to build innovative solutions for children and families around the globe.
• Henry Obispo is a Social-Entrepreneur, Environmentalist and ‘Eco-Gastronomer’ ’from The Bronx, the Founder and steward of ReBORN FARMS: giving life to a new eco-forward reality, by implementing hyper-local food systems. Henry’s mission is to create access, foster community empowerment and economic development through the implementation of a new green reality. Motivated by his sense of social responsibility, his mission is to revolutionize and decentralize food systems to serve populations long ignored and disinvested, to bring forth access and a future of food sovereignty. Using food as a tool for renewal, Henry rethinks how cities best serve their populations, developing equitable green infrastructure that centers them. Henry has developed some of the most impactful food justice programs and initiatives in The Bronx and NYC. As president of the Restaurant Cooperative, Henry is an advocate of immigrant/BIPOC restaurant and food entrepreneurs, focusing on sustainable ways the hospitality industry can engage in support of new value chains through closed-loop models and ecological best practices.
• Our Moderator: Grace Kwon is a facilitator, researcher, and strategist dedicated to uncovering business and user insights for beloved brands. Today at Spotify she spearheads transformative business projects, transforming how services are conceived, designed, and delivered in the music and audiobook business. Before Spotify, Grace brought her design thinking smarts to National Geographic, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the United Nations to reshape narratives surrounding climate change, economic mobility, and inequality. Grace also lectures at the Design for Social Innovation program where she teaches design students how to map and visualize systems to clearly articulate their thinking, explore ways of planning and communicatie solutions.

Our Program: Afterthought is a community committed to exploring the thorny, hairy, and complex questions that emerge in contemporary design practice. We delve into the pressing questions that occupy the minds of design thinkers and doers as they bring about solutions that extend beyond themselves – embracing families, communities, and our planet.

Our Sponsor: School of Visual Arts, MFA in Design for Social Innovation

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Design for Social Innovation (Floor 5), 136 West 21st Street, New York, United States