Discover a course that builds community while fostering climate justice.
A new course challenges students to move across disciplines and toward climate equity
By Julia Lynn Rubin
The Decolonized & Decarbonized (D&D) Dinner Party—begun as a Parsons-led multidisciplinary learning workshop aimed at building community, sharing regenerative practices, and promoting a broader range of sources in design—has become a university course that is sending innovative ideas out into the world.
Sometimes what begins as a one-time extracurricular learning experience evolves into something bigger. But rarely does such an event succeed in bringing makers together to both build community and advance pressing goals such as promoting regenerative and restorative practices while expanding the design canon. It is still more unusual for an extracurricular project to become a university course, inviting students to apply their own experience and approaches in experimenting and problem solving. But the Decolonized & Decarbonized (D&D) Dinner Party—which began as a series of workshops and events for Parsons
undergraduate and master’s students—evolved in exactly that way, to become a full-fledged course that was offered this year for the first time.
The endeavor began in 2020 with conversations between program directors Michele Gorman (MFA Interior Design), Yvette Chaparro (MFA Industrial Design), and Preeti Gopinath (MFA Textiles). The group discussed ways to help students address two issues of increasing concern to contemporary designers—decolonization and carbon capture in production—using creative approaches that draw on non-Western, and often more regenerative, traditions. A major goal was to
equip young designers with the tools they need to foster climate justice through their work. The trio also wanted to create a communal, cooperative learning experience for students just
“The success of the dinner party event is in its interdisciplinary approach, with each offering on the table representing a new design framework to address our climate crisis.”
Michele Gorman, director of the MFA Interior Design program
LEFT: MFA Textiles student Rachel Dana lays out the materials used in the sumac-based ink she shared at the Decolonized and Decarbonized Dinner Party course’s Earth Day public event. OPPOSITE: Each dinner party is documented in a book that explains how projects were created.
emerging from pandemic lockdowns. The first iteration involved three weeks of extracurricular workshops that culminated in an Earth Day dinner party at which students informally shared their design research.
Gopinath describes the aim of the original workshops as critical. “Our role is to nurture students’ passion for developing work that is layered with meaning and consequence.”
“The Decolonized & Decarbonized Dinner Party started out as workshops and grew to include a symposium,” explains Chaparro. “In the first two iterations, we developed themes connected to regenerative materials and processes and socially just practice—food
waste and water—that students could use as research prompts.”
The prompts involved exploring ways to simultaneously decarbonize and decolonize the design canon and extended projects from courses such as MFA Interior Design’s Studio 2 (Interior Food Ecologies), MFA Industrial Design’s Studio 2 (Local Production) and 4 (thesis projects), and MFA Textiles’ Major Studio 2 and Anthropology of Textiles. Students brought research conducted for those classes and for their theses to the workshops, sparking ideas for artifacts for a carbon-free dinner party.
“The dinner party allowed us to explore new ways to approach problems caused by the climate crisis that disproportionately affect marginalized bodies and that design has had a hand in creating—and is increasingly helping to address through co-design practices,” says Gorman. “Our Interior Food Ecologies course came directly out of Decolonized & Decarbonized Dinner Party work, and Interior Design students brought their food systems learning to the workshops and back to their own projects.”
“The faculty were inspired to develop a special elective course designed to broadly share the aims and spirit of the original extracurricular workshops,” says Chaparro. “The new class gave us time to develop the intersections between decolonization and decarbonization as a group through additional readings and discussions.”
Chaparro co-taught the first iteration of the course with fellow faculty member Barent Roth , director of the BFA Product Design program. Both sought to maintain in the classroom the openness that was important to past participants. They created a syllabus that allowed students to incorporate their disciplinary and personal research interests, such as natural dyeing, and knowledge drawn from their own backgrounds, including research about Indigenous materials and methods. Grades are now given at the end of the semester instead of on an assignment-by-assignment basis. In Gorman’s words, “Grades shouldn’t drive the work.”
“Students are passionate about creating solutions aimed at the thornier realities of historical colonization and climate change while staying hopeful.”
Barent Roth, director of the BFA Product Design program
"Having hosted last year’s Earth Day Dinner Party workshop at Circular Economy Manufacturing, our waste plastics upcycling microfactory, I’ve seen firsthand that students are passionate about creating solutions aimed at the thornier realities of historical colonization and climate change while staying hopeful,” says Roth.
On the day I visited the class, 18 students in a range of design disciplines were gathered around two tables arranged as if for a banquet.
They were setting up projects to be explored, touched, and even tasted by the public. This was not a traditional course but rather an interactive experience as organic as the materials being used.
“This is the most experimental class I’ve ever taken,” says Veronica Speyer, a third-year BFA Product Design. At first glance, her project appeared to involve an ordinary place setting, complete with a glass of red wine, on a rosered patterned tablecloth. Speyer informed us, though, that her goblet held cow’s blood—the pigment used to dye her hand-painted table linen. Through her subversive project, Dying to Dye, Speyer drew us into a tableau of domestic normalcy only to challenge us to rethink the ethics of meat consumption and our inhumane and unsustainable food system. Speyer reported that a class field trip to the Woodstock Farm Sanctuary helped students better understand the ethical significance of the animal-derived materials they often work with; visits to the National Museum of the American Indian and the Climate Museum provided further context. And the Dinner Party on Governors Island enabled them to present their innovative projects to a wider audience.
Litian Li, a first-year MFA Industrial Design student, agrees with Speyer. “Our class is different because of the experimental element,”
“What drew me to this class was the freedom to explore.”
— Jonah Goodman, MFA Industrial Design student
he says. “Everyone is doing something unique— from making dishes to preparing kombucha to baking cricket crackers.”
The students soon began examining one another’s projects with interest. We tasted biscuits made from crickets—a high-protein, sustainable food source—that first-year MFA Industrial Design student Leonardo Possati created with ingredients from Bologna, his native city, such as seasoned salt, blended with cricket flour, an ingredient eaten daily in countries such as China and Thailand. We touched kitchen tiles that fourth-year MArch students Rebecca Bran and Nick Cuervo-Torello created from oyster shells bound together in a natural matrix and drank first-year MFA Industrial Design student Jonah Goodman’s home-fermented kombucha varieties, tailored to individual gut health needs.
The workshops and course culminated in the publication of a recipe book designed to introduce decarbonization and decolonization to readers in accessible and experiential terms and provide detailed instructions for replicating the students’ projects.
“You can follow other people’s ‘recipes,’ re-create their projects, and share in everyone’s learning,” explains Jimena Bedoya, a first-year MFA Textiles student. Bedoya’s project, BioAmend, was inspired by kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken objects. She created swatches of biomaterials from flowers, wool yarn, and natural dyes and stitched them together to form a vessel. First-year MFA Textiles student Rachel Dana encouraged me to touch and examine the furry fruit of a staghorn sumac plant, explaining that she used it to produce the ink used for writing on the parchment pages displayed beside it. “Anyone with access to New York–native sumacs can make this natural ink without expending much energy,” she says of her affordable, eco-friendly recipe.
“What drew me to this class was the freedom to explore,” says Goodman. “We’re
Jonah Goodman’s project—kombucha shots tailored to individual gut health needs—arose from his interests in and experience with fermentation and natural healthcare.
ABOVE: At the 2023 D&D Dinner Party, MFA Interior Design student Tatiana Konstantinidi shared work created for her MFA Interior Design Studio 2 Interior Food Ecologies class. Shown here are serving pieces made from brewery waste, agar agar, glycerol, water, and calcium propionate.
turning speculative design into reality. I’ve always wanted a class like this, where art, design, science, the future of food, and social benefits are combined.”
“For the university course, we had to add the rigor of deliverables, grades, evident progress, and participation. This process is an example of how we approach interdisciplinary learning and teaching at Parsons,” says Chaparro. Like the workshops, the new class features lectures by outside experts and creative practitioners. Over the years, these have included Mike Renzy, assistant director of GrowNYC’s Green Space project; Peruvian design scholar Maria Linares Trelles; Christopher Schlottmann, co-author of a book used in the class; and Jessica Thies, MFA Industrial Design ’23, who took part in the 2022 and 2023 workshops and today works as a biomaterials researcher at Parsons’ Healthy Materials Lab.
“The dinner party gave us an opportunity to talk to one another outside of our majors and programs.”
—Sydney Moss, MFA Interior Design alum
To better understand the evolution of this immersion in integrated learning, I contacted past participants to get their insights. I first spoke to Thies, who is now a postgraduate research fellow at Parsons’ Healthy Materials Lab (HML).
"For me, the original workshop series was really powerful,” says Thies. After years of school with masks and being unable to be with people in person and collaborate, it was
BELOW: The public D&D Dinner Party Earth Day event enabled students to share their work with peers from other classes and the public.
also the first time I was in a room eating and sharing—that was really special.”
Sydney Moss, a former MFA Interior Design student, valued the 2023 workshop's crossprogram collaboration. “The dinner party gave us an opportunity to talk to one another outside of our majors and programs,” she says. “We all have different studios, so it was good to just be in the room with students from other departments, to ask them what their classes are like and about their work.” Gorman concurs, adding that “the success of the dinner party event is in its interdisciplinary approach, with each offering on the table representing a new design framework to address our climate crisis.”
Lina Celis Rengifo, MFA Textiles ’23, signed up for the 2022 workshop in part because it offered a space free from hierarchy among students and faculty. Her thesis involved creatively repurposing bags used to transport coffee from Colombia to the United States.
“Not having set expectations about what I was going to get out of the experience was great,” says Celis. “I enjoyed the process of questioning and the option to move between practices.”
2022 workshop. “I wish I had had access to the information from the workshop before I finished my thesis; the experience inspired me to expand upon my design for a communal kitchen.”
“Students have the opportunity to explore materials and projects without the pressure of it being their thesis,” agrees Thies, who was encouraged by Chaparro to take part in the initiative. “We think about the ingredients in food, but not necessarily about the ingredients in the materials we’re creating when building.”
My final D&D 2024 course visit followed a ferry ride to Governors Island for the Earth Day Dinner Party. I found Gorman, Chaparro, and Roth helping students arrange their work on a long table in neat rows that resembled place settings. Students from MFA Interior Design classes contributed their own research on food rituals and biomaterials to the table and examined the creations of their fellow students with interest. Others joined Earth Day visitors at Roth’s Microfactory, where he explained how his solar-powered facility converts city plastic waste into planters, lamps, children's furniture, and traffic cones.
Gorman emphasizes that it was also important to create a place where students could draw on their own cultures, regenerative practices, and rituals around decolonization. “My thesis involved looking at food as a tool for preserving immigrant identity, resisting colonialities of power, and encouraging exchanges within a diverse economy,” says Sam (Jia Wei Samantha) Tong ’22 , an MFA Interior Design alum who participated in the
Like the class itself, the event sparked lively conversations. Passersby stopped to engage with students and discuss their work. Chaparro told me that it was just what the Parsons faculty team had hoped for. “We try to create communal learning experiences that build transformative human connections,” she says.
I thought about what Celis described as the most important outcome of the D&D learning experience: “We built a community that, like a tree branch, starts to expand and grow, adding new disciplines that make the community stronger, both emotionally and academically.”
Julia Lynn Rubin is a graduate of the MFA Creative Writing program at The New School. She is the author of three young adult novels and currently serves as a copywriter for The New School’s Marketing and Communication team.
