SCI-Arc students and Design Immersion Days & Youth Outreach Coordinator Mira Henry explored the relationship between creative thinking and making with a group of high school students from Inner-City Arts at ZOOM!, a one-day immersive workshop. The arts-focused, LA-based community organization of 25+ years played host to one of the Institute’s first installments of POP-Arc, a community outreach program in the spirit of pop-up events.

The one-day workshop was planned as more than a day of exploration for the high school students; it was also a seminar for graduate and undergraduate students. “The curriculum was called ZOOM! because we wanted to look at how scale, and playing with it, changes objects and what that implicates for our world,” Henry says.

Organized with the assistance of SCI-Arc students and SCI-Arc Undergraduate Program Chair Tom Wiscombe, the curriculum was framed around architectural order and disorder, and introduced Inner-City Arts students to the idea of materiality. Following a brief lecture on principles of organization, students used bottle corks, toothpicks, rubber bands, packing peanuts, straws, chopsticks, and other objects in the world that are unitized, to make models with seemingly disorderly material by thinking through rules and order.

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