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Charlie Cannon and Innovation Studio

Charlie Cannon is the energetic founder and teacher of RISD's award-winning Innovation Studio. An interdisciplinary class in its eleventh year, the studio invites industrial design, landscape architecture, and architecture students to collaborate on large-scale infrastructure and environmental issues. Last weekend at A Better World By Design, the three-day conference organized by students at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, I visited the I.D. department and talked to Cannon at the workshop, where fourteen students are re-envisioning and redesigning Rhode Island's energy policies and practices.

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What are the results of the Innovation Studio like?

Unlike conventional design studios, where a ‘brief’ is extremely spelled out and clarified, the Innovation Studio students encounter problems that actually need to be defined in order to be solved. The students learn about problem framing after the initial inquiry, and they themselves choose which specific aspect to tackle. We've had final products as landscape interventions, design details, complete systems, buildings, even advertising campaigns.

There seems to be just so much to cover -- how do you arrange the basic schedule or timeline of the class?

For the first week, each student becomes an expert on one source of energy, one kind of system, and one precedent. Then we divide up into [interdisciplinary] teams, and talk to engineers, policy makers, designers, and activist groups. We reconvene and do a one-and-a-half-day charrette. Then we reconvene and each take a real, opposing position on these issues. That leaves us with about three weeks left for students to define their own question, do the "real design" work, and of course, produce.

Do you think that in trying to cover so much breadth, the minutiae of necessary technology and engineering concepts are cast off to the wayside?

Yes. Certainly -- but we really value the amount of precedent research. In covering such a wide base of study at different scales, instead of embracing a beautiful, "inspiring" precedent (as is often the case with architecture studios), we really get at a range of solutions.

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Robert Williams, a graduate student in architecture at RISD, explains lightning fields, Hawaii's new energy policies, and more.

What's the takeaway from this? Any plans to scale up?

Actually, seventy-five percent of students who took this class engage in this kind of work today. We've found that through students (instead of working force designers and architects) a much more open conversation and decision-making process can emerge. Over the last four or five years, we've really been able to bring the Innovation Studio into the public eye, and our aspirations can be considered three-fold: one, to transform education, two, transform policy practices, and three, transform the world. We understand that's pretty big...

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  • Published: October 5, 2009

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