Island City Lab

Join us March 27 @ 2pm EST (UTC-5 Jamaica Time) for the final conversation in our Emerging Practice Lecture Series with Vernelle A. A. Noel Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Computational Design at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Director of the Situated Computation + Design Lab. Her research is at the intersection of embodied creative practices, technological practices, and society. Using interdisciplinary approaches, she builds new frameworks, methodologies, and expressions to explore social, cultural, and political aspects of computation to create new reconfigurations of practice, pedagogy, and publics. Dr. Noel’s work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and ideas2innovation (i2i), among others. She is co-editor of the new book, “Critical Computational Relations in Design, Architecture and the Built Environment” with Dr. Yana Boeva which explores how computational practices, tools, and methods mask social, political, and environmental entanglements. Dr. Noel also has a TEDx Talk titled, “The Power of Making: Craft, Computation, and Carnival.”

Join us for the second conversation in our Emerging Practice Lecture Series in conversation with Massiel Mejia, Arquitectura del Paisaje. Massiel Mejia is a Dominican Landscape Architect principal and founder of MMAP (Massiel Mejia, Arquitectura del Paisaje) a consulting firm dedicated to the design, planning, supervision and management of Landscape Architecture projects, based in the Dominican Republic since 2010. Through her professional practice, she aims to leave a positive impact on the environment of each project, taking care of the details, honoring each element that is part of the ecology by producing quality green spaces of an architecture that preserves the environmental and historical values of its context and in which nature always plays a fundamental role.

Join us for the second conversation in our Emerging Practice Lecture Series in conversation with Massiel Mejia, Arquitectura del Paisaje. Massiel Mejia is a Dominican Landscape Architect principal and founder of MMAP (Massiel Mejia, Arquitectura del Paisaje) a consulting firm dedicated to the design, planning, supervision and management of Landscape Architecture projects, based in the Dominican Republic since 2010. Through her professional practice, she aims to leave a positive impact on the environment of each project, taking care of the details, honoring each element that is part of the ecology by producing quality green spaces of an architecture that preserves the environmental and historical values of its context and in which nature always plays a fundamental role.

RSVP at the link in bio! Join us Thursday, Feb 13 @ 1pm for the first conversation in our Emerging Practice Lecture series featuring Marlon Darbeau.

In this excerpt from our 'capturelands' series, Rachel Goffe emphasizes the need to shift how we think about land to acknowledge that the point is life-making not property-making.

Join us Thursday, Feb 13 @ 1pm in conversation with Marlon Darbeau founder and lead designer at byMaking. Inspired by tradition, By Making designs and manufactures utilitarian objects that challenge what is expected from the Caribbean. Marlon Darbeau is the founder of byMaking, an object design studio. He has practised in various disciplines including Communication Design, Identity Design, Packaging, Environmental and Furniture Design. He comes from a family tradition of making things in workshops either at home or very close to home - his father manufactures sheet metal mailboxes, his great-uncle was a welding fabricator, and his grandfather specialised in the making of wooden windows and doors. Darbeau is interested in how his family-making traditions intersect with his practice as a Designer. He uses this convergence to formulate ways of creating projects. Through ‘design and making’ he investigates the relationship between the utilitarian object, people and place. Darbeau’s research focuses on the reinterpretation of traditional / familiar things, with an intent to develop new, unexpected, beautiful and desirable objects. Each object resounds with the value of working with different types of makers and technologies to provide the basis for creating sustainable processes and relationships. His investigations into Design & Making have led to exhibitions locally and internationally: ‘Peera’ a re-interpretation of a traditional small bench as part of the Global Africa Project at the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC. November 2010 - May 2011; ‘Verb’ at Beyond the Mask Storytelling in Black Art + Design 2019, Balance, Texas Contemporary 2019, curated by Black Artists + Designers Guild.

Our interview with Discovery is now live, we discuss the geopolitical forces affecting Caribbean cities and our response to climate change. We also explore decentralized, community driven processes through our work in Cassava Piece. Discovery is a quarterly publication by @culturalcounsel. Read more at the link in bio.

Amanda Byer challenges the dominance of a 'speculative, market-driven' approach to the management of land and argues for an 'embedded notion of land right'. Excerpt from 'capturelands' now available on YouTube. #infrastructure #housingcrisis #landrights #communal #communityland

Capturelands is now available on YouTube! The Capturelands webinar series examined the legacy and futures of our relationships with land and housing across the region. We will explore alternative approaches from peer cities in the Caribbean that have used radically different planning, policy, legal, and design frameworks to provide decent and affordable housing for their residents #housingcrisis #tourism #informality #infrastructure #urbanhousing #communityhousing #community

2024 has been a year of learning by doing; transitioning our energies from ideation to execution and sustaining that energy throughout delays and setbacks.