Friday, February 28 AND Saturday, March 1, 2025

9 am – 12 noon, Rapson Courtyard

Advance registration is requested; please register at z.umn.edu/burst-reg.

Coffee and a light breakfast will be available each day, and lunch will be provided at the conclusion of the workshop on Saturday.

Each spring, the KDI Burst encourages students’ participatory engagement with diverse creative perspectives, through a workshop featuring guest designers and scholars.

In this two-day, hands-on workshop, Drawing Material Kin, students will explore our lands, worlds, and planet by layering stories from the material residues of our daily lives. These artifacts are physical stories, left behind through processes of extraction and consumption. Workshop participants will cultivate knowledge held by the hands of ordinary bodies, the people who are rarely seen yet nurture us by sourcing, cleaning, and managing these materials. These histories are rarely cited, but vital for understanding human-nature ecologies and the systems we construct to sustain them.

By appraising techniques in mark-making, workshop participants will negotiate and acknowledge our closeness to, entanglement in, and kinship with the material world. Patterning our processes with frameworks in archaeology, indigenous wisdom, and ethnography, we will twine and compress our findings into a series of sketchbooks.

Participants will learn skills including fieldwork, ethnographic drawing, and introductory book-binding techniques. A culminating showcase will support imagination of other(ed) practices beyond the capitalized language of “circularity, regeneration, and repair”—all at the scale of a page in the body of a book.

This workshop is co-facilitated by Tommy CheeMou Yang, a multi-disciplinary HMoob designer, researcher, and educator, with KDI Co-Principals Tejas Dhadphale (associate professor and undergraduate program director, product design) and Malini Srivastava (associate professor of architecture and associate dean for research, creative scholarship, and engagement).

Coffee and a light breakfast will be provided each day, and lunch will be provided at the conclusion of the workshop on Saturday.

Both undergraduate and graduate students are invited to participate. Advance registration is requested; please register at z.umn.edu/burst-reg. If you have dietary restrictions, please register by February 20 to ensure availability of a meal meeting your needs.

About the Kusske Design Initiative

A generous commitment from Manitou Fund to the University of Minnesota’s College of Design honors the memory of distinguished alumnus Christopher Arthur Kusske (BLA ’78). The Kusske Design Initiative (KDI) reflects his legacy through widely inclusive events and collaborations among a growing design community. Chris’s emphases on interdisciplinary dialogue, co-creativity, and celebration of the natural world inspire timely solutions. KDI programs and inquiries have transformative potential for the products we use, the environments we inhabit, and the systems we tend.

About the Facilitators

Tommy CheeMou Yang is a multidisciplinary HMoob designer, researcher, and educator at Carnegie Mellon University. Tommy’s design research and teaching focus on bridging the disciplines of architecture, ecology and the humanities through storytelling and ethnography. His works unpack how ordinary stories and rituals cascade into architectural and urban changes using methods in fieldwork, oral/public history, material landscapes, vernacular wisdom and construction, in addition to visual narratives.

Tejas Dhadphale is an associate professor of product design at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. His research examines the relationship between culture, design thinking, and research methods in design education and practice. Trained as a design researcher, he is passionate about developing frameworks for designers and researchers to integrate cultural aspects into the design process. He teaches courses in culture of objects, design research methods, design thinking, creative thinking, transdisciplinary new product innovation, and human-centered design.

Malini Srivastava is a licensed architect in the state of Minnesota, associate professor in resilient and regenerative design, and director of the Masters of Science in Research Practices program in the College of Design. Her work spans research, teaching, and practice in urban-scale pervasive play frameworks, high-performance architecture, responsive building skins and other interventions to address energy use in the built environment. To support her practice, she maintains certification as a passive house consultant. Malini is the co-principal of the award-winning firm, Dandelab and project lead of efargo, a university-city-utility partnership aimed at reducing city-wide energy use. Her extensive involvement with architectural projects has led to national and regional awards for design, preservation and efficiency, LEED certification, Passive House pre-certification and a Committee on the Environment National Top Ten Environmental building award. She is a 2018 recipient of the American Institute of Architects’ Young Architect Award and a 2014 recipient of the Archibald and Edyth Bush Fellowship. In 2017, Malini received the Outstanding Educator Award from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at NDSU. She received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and MArch from the University of Minnesota.

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