Eva Dale  0:00  
From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now.

David Staley  0:32  
I'm pleased to be joined today by Susan Melsop, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. She is a recipient of the Faculty Award for Excellence in Community Based Scholarship, the Arts and Humanities Outreach Award from the College of the Arts and Sciences, and in 2015, was the recipient of the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award. Welcome to Voices, Professor Melsop.

Susan Melsop  0:59  
Thank you very much, David.

David Staley  1:01  
Well, I'm particularly interested in your community based scholarship, and I know you teach quite a lot in service learning or community based courses, and I wanted to start first with "Design Matters", a service learning course you've done. Tell us about "Design Matters".

Susan Melsop  1:16  
So, "Design Matters" is a course that I came up with the name does mean something, but I'll tell you first a little bit about the course. The course was established as a service learning course. And it engages urban youth from the east side, students who are in the transit arts program that Central Community House supports, and I engaged with that urban youth group, and took not just design students, but they were actually interdisciplinary students. So I had a lot of students from across disciplines or their hyoe State campus who were interested in basically, knowing how to engage communities, or underserved populations, communities in need. And they wanted to know how to translate their knowledge and skills from their disciplinary areas and know how it might transfer and translate into meaningful, productive ways of being in the community. And so the very first design matters, I taught, believe it was 2010. And I had students from cultural anthropology, sociology, systems engineering, and architecture, landscape architecture, and then a bunch of design students. Clearly I was in over my head. But these students were eager, they were enthusiastic. And they knew that they had an opportunity to engage with a population that they had never really engaged with before. So I brought everybody together, listen very carefully to their skills, their talent, their knowledge bases, and then wove everybody together. So they were basically team based projects. So the students could be working on a type of project that they wanted to work on. But they also had these urban youth from transit Arts, on their projects. And I lead them through a design process. And that design process back then it was on the quarter system. So it was a 1011 week design process of doing preliminary design, schematic design, design, development, prototyping, and then full scale building. And we made large furniture pieces for the rehabilitation of a house on the east side that was being converted into a community art center. For the east side. It's an extension of Central Community House. And so that course the design matters engaging with the urban youth took place for four consecutive years each year with a different, you know, set of students. Although I had a number of graduate students who repeated the course, they were eager to kind of continue the work with the urban youth, and demonstrating how the revitalization of this old house into a community center for art could really add to the revitalization efforts on the east side.

David Staley  4:20  
Same kinds of projects each time? Was it furniture, or were there other kinds of projects over the years?

Susan Melsop  4:25  
So the projects were primarily furniture scale design works, everything from a very large coffee bar, to coffee tables, to chalkboard doors to chairs, seating, elements, benches, and shelving. Basically, these were furniture elements that Central Community House needed in the house. They needed this type of interior, what I would call infrastructure, or intimate architecture. I had already basically pre identified had what these project types would be with the executive directors and the other facilitators at Central Community House to know basically what my scope of knowledge base was, and what I could conceivably or feasibly do during a quarter with students who had no construction skills. 

David Staley  5:19  
So that was my next question. You said that you had design students, but you said you had cultural anthropology and systems engineering - did that pose a challenge, the whole notion of designing and building? 

Susan Melsop  5:30  
Indeed it did, and I collected the students and I got them to talk about what they were interested in getting from the course. And very luckily, the community partner was willing to be exploratory, and also take these other avenues. So while there were a number of physical built products that would then be left behind, for the community to us, we also had projects one was a beautiful video about service learning and the community engagement, and the connection to the community. So the cultural anthropologist was very eager to develop a small film, a short film, and kind of show the OSU partnership, the engagement and the connection to this really unique group of urban teens in the transit arts program. So she used her skills and her knowledge, her disciplinary basis really became the format that enabled her to then be the lead on the filmmaking project. So having the ability to conduct these beautiful interviews, to capture these beautiful stills and weave them together and do a short film was one product. Another one was a book, you know, a beautiful book was the outcome of this too. So again, students aren't necessarily just behind the table saws, and in the woodshop, but they're also thinking about how do we express and demonstrate to everybody how meaningful these types of learning engagements can be a learning is really happening, the exchange of learning is really happening across these diverse populations. And that's basically what I'm trying to celebrate. I'm simply using design because that's what I know to do. I usually use design as a medium, to bring diverse groups of people together, to have a creative exploratory time together. And in the end, hopefully, we've made something. But more important than that final product is really the relationships that get built. And this identifying with other that others, not that other after all. 

David Staley  7:43  
So, I know in 2018, you spent a semester in Sao Paulo in Brazil: was that part of "Design Matters", or was that a different sort of course.

Susan Melsop  7:50  
Yeah, so upon receiving the Ratner award, it gave me an opportunity to basically take what I had learned from the east side, and the development of that design matters service learning course, take it to an international audience. And I returned home basically, I was part of my adolescent years when I was raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil. So it seemed like a likely place for me to go, I thought we are comfortable there. But let's put it that way. It was in 2016 that I spent the majority of the summer developing partnerships with different NGOs, nonprofits and universities. And from those partnerships, I was able to basically developed a design matters in Brazil course. And engaging with Mackenzie Presbyterian University in Sao Paulo, a wonderful colleague there was eager to basically do what we have called Social Impact design. So we developed the course and so design matters. There's really understood as social impact design, it's engaging with a national movement for the streets situation population. And they were gifted a very large facility by the city, this homeless population, but it was really just a blank slate, there's no again infrastructure or furnishings inside this very large 12,000 square foot empty shell of a building. And yet they have aspirations to put on workshops and work development and art exhibitions and to not just support the homeless population living on the streets. But to turn this into a place where the homeless people or unsheltered people have more connections and interactions with sheltered people and bringing those diverse populations together. So we developed the course in order to have Ohio State University students together with Mackenzie Presbyterian university students in these design build projects. And we did a series of different types of furniture and installations for this very large facility to accommodate the needs of this national movement for the homeless population. installations like installations as in probably the largest one that we did was a an acoustical, soundproofing curtain wall, the facility that the city of Sao Paulo gifted to this national movement for the street situation population to long name, but they were gifted this very large building. It's basically a bridge. It has a road that runs above it, and there's a eight lane highway below it. 

David Staley  10:50  
It was like an actual, it's an actual bridge? 

Susan Melsop  10:51  
It's an actual bridge. 

David Staley  10:53  
Oh my.

Susan Melsop  10:53  
It was originally constructed, conceived to be a metro stop, but the metro train just never actually ran through it or stopped in this bridge. So it's a vacated very, very large, empty space. So the noisy, so it's incredibly noisy. And the bridge is basically a series of windows on one whole length of the bridge that straddles an eight lane highway. So it's pretty massive in Sao Paulo, but not tall, right, it's probably a 12 foot tall, 300 foot long bridge. So the space is large, it's vacuous and very loud. So we came up with an acoustical sound attenuating curtain wall built from foam, folded foam that we were able to purchase in Sao Paulo, and the design of which the outcome of which it has reduced the decibels of the sound in that space. So it accommodates community events better. Now, additional type projects in that space are a series of benches and seating elements. Again, there's no place to sit and I one interesting tidbit about that is that we work very closely with the street situation population. And so they came in and often participated in the design build building of the projects. And when we were building the benches, they were very poignant to let us know that benches weren't good enough that they spend most of their time sitting on curbs what they really wanted, it would be a luxury to have a back to a chair. So all of a sudden, all of our benches and chairs had backs to them with some good lumbar support. So just you know smaller things like that, that you may not think about, but really mattered to the human condition. For me, that is a way to demonstrate to students how important their design skills are and how important it is to connect to the real people who will be living these designs living these experiences. And so bringing it back full circle. Now, David, you know, for me the experiential learning, that's when you can put what they've learned from the classroom, but out into a real world experience, and create these environments where they can test their learning and learn that much more before graduation. And I can craft and prepare that environment in such a way that they can take risks. And we can really practice the design, build practice the social impact design, prior to graduation.

David Staley  13:41  
Even if it results in failure or mistake, presumably one can learn from these. 

Susan Melsop  13:47  
That's the idea. Yeah, in that regard, I do a lot of reflective practices, so that we can revisit it and talk about it, and students can almost demonstrate to themselves, how much they've learned through the process by this deep kind of reflective practice.

David Staley  14:07  
All of this, the experiential learning that you're talking about, is this part of the thinking behind the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Lab? Tell us more about the DESIS Lab.

Susan Melsop  14:17  
I started a DESIS Lab with a colleague of mine in the Department of Design. By doing so, this is not a new thing. The DESIS Labs is a network of international Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability labs around the world, and they were started in the Milan Polytechnic University, and they've basically just kind of grown across the globe, which is really phenomenal. Unfortunately, United States only has four DESIS labs. So now Ohio State is on the map, we have a DESIS Lab and the premise truly is about demonstrating designs capacities to be a engaged with communities in need. And through participatory design methodologies engage people in the making of their urban or rural neighborhoods. It's really kind of capitalizing on the creativity of many people together and together collectively, making things to make communities better. And that betterment can be many different things, a design build project, or a garden, an urban farm. So, it can take many different forms, but it's exciting to have a DESIS Lab at Ohio State.

David Staley  15:37  
So what sort of got you interested in service learning or community based scholarship or community based teaching? I mean, you obviously are quite expert and quite passionate about this. What was your journey to this point?

Susan Melsop  15:52  
I would say that the journey has been quite circuitous and, and not so much arduous but just not at all in a linear, or did I have any idea how this would all come about? To be quite honest, I've always been very eager to have hands on experiences. And I think I'm mostly deeply responsive to whole person learning. And so I'll tell you a little bit more about whole person 30, because that seems so vague and abstract. But for me, it's in a nutshell, it would be mind body spirit. So mind might be the theoretical, the abstract, the knowledge base, but it's really kind of in your head and then dropping down into your body, how you engage your whole body. And so that physicality of the building and the learning that comes from not knowing how to put a piece of furniture together, and getting your whole body involved with that, but the engagement with others to make that larger piece of work is important. And then this spirit, or the emotional aspect, the emotional engagement that you have, not just kind of through your own self awareness, but that engagement with other so that now you are wholly connected with mind, body and spirit in the making of these projects, but in the process, the making of community. And so for me, it simply kind of started from a simple recognition, that whole body learning whole body awareness is incredibly important. And then what does that look like when you're developing a course? 

David Staley  17:36  
Speaking of courses, in addition to your service learning courses, what other courses do you teach in design?

Susan Melsop  17:41  
I teach what's called a collaborative studio, so again, this is interdisciplinary. As far as the Department of Design goes, it's engaging the visual communications in industrial product design students with interior design. And again, those kinds of outputs that we hope for there is that students are able to be incredibly collaborative, when they leave the four year curriculum. And they know how to share and exchange knowledge across their disciplines and communicate effectively towards a project goal. And what I like to add to that collaborative studio is trying to respond to a nonprofits needs, you know, the community, whether it's an underserved population, or a nonprofit has particular needs. So I'll add that to the collaborative studio. So the students have to work with themselves right amongst their team members, but then also have to, you know, really respond and do active listening with their nonprofit sponsors, basically.

David Staley  18:50  
What are you working on now? What's next for your research?

Susan Melsop  18:53  
I would say that I'm still highly engaged in what I call social innovation, education. And that does return us to cultivating principles in our teaching, that we know students will have the types of experiences that will lend themselves to cultivating self awareness, practicing ethical competencies that will leverage more self awareness that will enable them to be collaborative, to be competent, and all these things not just professionally, but I would say the personal development, that very deep, profound self awareness is incredibly important. And cultivating compassion for self and other I think is key.

David Staley  19:49  
Susan Melsop. Thank you.

Susan Melsop  19:51  
Thank you very much, Dr. Staley.

Eva Dale  19:54  
Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer, Produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale.

Did you know that 23 programs in the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences are nationally ranked as top 25 programs, with more than 10 of them in the top 10? That's why we say the College of Arts and Sciences is the intellectual and academic core of the Ohio State University. Learn more about the College at artsandsciences.osu.edu

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