Ayako Maruyama

Ayako Maruyama is a Filipina-Japanese designer, teacher and illustrator, who teaches foundational and advanced design studios at RISD and works to cultivate a community of Industrial Design students, faculty and staff. In 2024, she received RISD’s John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. She has also taught at the graduate level in Boston University’s City Planning and Urban Affairs program.

Maruyama’s practice and research centers intentional collaboration, reflection, collective recovery, maintenance and repair. Her practice has been shaped by her work with Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) creating public engagement strategies around community development. Her early work focused on designing and producing creative labs, interactive spaces for community engagement and social justice, including leading the production of the Go Boston 2030 Visioning Lab, an unprecedented public space for Boston residents to express their vision for the city’s 15-year transportation plan. 

Together with Lori Lobenstine, Kenny Bailey and Jeffrey Yoo Warren, she co-authored and co-illustrated Ideas Arrangements Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice, which offers a framework for imagining new arrangements. Their work on Social Emergency Response Centers has been exhibited at Project Row Houses Round 48: Beyond Social Practice and the Designing Peace exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, which traveled to The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco.

She is a board member at University of Orange in New Jersey, a free school of restoration urbanism founded in 2008 and building on a 64-year history of progressive organizing. There Maruyama has served as the Urbanist in Residence and worked on the Collective Recovery team.

Together with Interior Architecture Professor Markus Berger, she started a project called reharvest repair: a circular economy research project that was awarded a 2024 Somerson Sustainability Innovation Fund grant. The project includes two components: re-harvesting to build networks with Rhode Island industries and document the material discard flows that can be utilized; and re-pair, the reimagination of these resources with students and community partners.