This Spring 2024 series, generously co-sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research, invited campus artists, humanities scholars, and researchers in the sciences and social sciences to imagine the many ways that our campus and connected spaces might serve as a living laboratory for environmental research.

We selected six teams (comprising 23 UI faculty members) as participants that included members from CLAS, College of Education, College of Engineering, College of Law, College of Public Health, and the Graduate College. Their projects ranged from developing remote sensing strategies for testing air and water to creating an indigo garden on campus for artists to experiment with traditional and Indigenous dyes in printmaking to a collaboration with the Johnson County Poor Farm on regenerative environments to a water quality project involving dancers, humanities scholars, and engineers. We reached out to a wide group of stakeholders, including not only faculty, but also our campus planner, Adele Vanarsdale, and campus arborist, Andy Dahl.

The funds allowed us to host two events and a day of consultations. First, we invited two leaders in place-based collaborative environmental research to visit. They met with the teams to provide a first round of coaching and then delivered public lectures (attendance: 30) to model possibilities for interdisciplinary collaborative research using the Living Lab model.

Kathleen Socolofsky, Assistant Vice Chancellor and Director, UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden. AVC Socolofsky is the co-developer of three initiatives that are being used as models for universities and public gardens across the United States. 

Bethany Wiggin, Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities and the My Climate Story and Ecotopian Toolkit projects and Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania with affiliations in Comparative Literature, English, and International Studies.

Second, we invited Lesley-Ann Noel, professor of design (and about to become Dean at OCAD University in Canada). Professor Noel approaches design through emancipatory and critical lenses, focusing on equity, social justice, and the experiences of people who are often excluded from design research, especially in educational settings. Professor Noel shared her research at a Prairie Lights book event (attendance: 50), then designed and led a daylong design sprint for the six groups, encouraging them to build ways to engage often overlooked communities and accessibility into the very research design of their projects.