DESIGN FACULTY INTRODUCTION > STEVEN CHODORIWSKY
FALL 2020
The Design Program is happy to welcome Assistant Professor Steven Chodoriwsky to our faculty this year. He is teaching Design Product Studio 1 with our Design Sophomores as well as Design History & Theory in the spring.
Design Utah: What interested you about the Multi-disciplinary Design Program?
Steven: To me, the program is an idiosyncratic learning environment that encourages a range of voices and critical attitudes around how we participate with our environments as designers— how we read, write and make (and remake!) things with curiosity and purpose.
Design Utah: What is your educational background?
Steven: I studied architecture at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. (Formally speaking)
Design Utah: Describe your design practice?
Steven: My design practice engages with performance and interdisciplinary platforms, pedagogical models, and research on the built environment. Projects take the form of site-specific installations, publications and book designs, workshops, theatre acts, texts, and audio-visual artifacts—usually in close collaboration with other individuals or institutions. Teaching is also central to my practice, and I try to incorporate these aspects directly into the classroom.
Design Utah: What projects are you currently working on?
Steven: Alongside ongoing writing and research projects, I am part of the working group Collective Question, with curator Julie Niemi and graphic designer Chris Lee. We are currently preparing an exhibition, opening next year in Buffalo, on the histories and practices of Tolstoy College, an experimental anarchist college community at the University at Buffalo in the 1970s-80s. The show will combine design research, archival and oral history components, and installation-/event-based presentations that both celebrate the College’s history and speculate on its reconstitution in a contemporary context.
Design Utah: What is your hope for the future of design education?
Steven: To generate spaces and communities of study that are student-centered and context-specific. To foster care, craft, and a loose—even un-disciplined—sense of lateral experimentation. To cultivate designer-citizens with a knack for research, a feel for composition, a filter for bulls*%#, and an imperative to combat all forms of inequality and injustice through their work.
Design Utah: In Covid times, what do you miss about Third Floor North?
Steven: So much of our educational experience is catalyzed outside of structured class sessions. I miss the incidental contact in the halls with students and colleagues, the ability to drift into another review and pick up on that energy, and contribute to the bustle and camaraderie of the program in unpredictable ways.
View Steven’s faculty profile here.
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