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.
Dear Student,
No matter what professional design direction we choose, we will work with people. This studio is about cultivating a people-centric design practice. Public engagement is about listening, and is an intricate process that informs decisions and approaches towards change.
We will begin by co-creating our studio’s space, and practice intentional methods for collaboration and critique. Our first projects will be to find the tools and spaces where we already engage with people. We will learn about concepts like the ‘user’, then interrogate and integrate them meaningfully into our work through understanding our positionality, exercising question design, interview protocols and survey best practices.
Larger projects in this studio will include a collaboratively curated experience for our ID community. We will practice prototyping with smaller sketch models, and at full scale with power tools and found materials. Assignments will be based on creating presentations, short videos, sketches, models and mapping tools. We will learn more about the city of Providence and other communities through case studies, documentaries, field trips, archives, walks and conversations with people. This studio is about finding unconventional connections by studying existing public engagement, learning about its historically complex and problematic contexts and systems, and ethnographic practices, and by designing intentional and inclusive experiences for people.
Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Preference is given to Industrial Design Students.
Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design
This course introduces the Graduate Thesis project starting with the development of a research question through secondary research reading methods. This question has its assumptions articulated and verified through experimental making and primary research methods that engage specific audiences for qualitative discourse.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.
Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design
This course introduces the Graduate Thesis project starting with the development of a research question through secondary research reading methods. This question has its assumptions articulated and verified through experimental making and primary research methods that engage specific audiences for qualitative discourse.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.
Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design
Industrial Design bears the burden of planned obsolescence which are inherited strategies that ensure a product will not last in order to drive sales. The way our objects have been and continue to be made, distributed and marketed are embedded with consumerist ideas that in turn, have produced devastating environmental, social and cultural effects. The legacy of our sector has contributed to overproduction, overconsumption and a culture of rampant disposability that has led to a global waste management stream of invisible and hazardous labor conditions for people and the environment.
Electric fans cool, warm, dry, exhaust and circulate air in domestic, institutional and industrial settings. Spinning blades to move air are found everywhere from our living rooms to our laptops. As appliances and simple mechanisms, they are ubiquitous and require frequent repair and cleaning. So, how do planned obsolescence and fans connect? In this shop and theory based Advanced Design Studio, we will work with the Electric Fan as a guide to analyze and intervene in arrangements of planned obsolescence, production and disposal, maintenance, domesticity and comfort, urgency and efficiency, energy and urbanism, and beauty and function. We will learn about the use and development of electric fans in relation to the changing climate, locally and globally.
The first part of the semester’s projects is dedicated to disassembly, reassembly and experimentation introducing you to basic electronics, motor functions, physical computing, and applying strategies to design for repair in mind. We will disassemble products and systems, including manufacturing processes, industrial waste streams and learning about the people who work in these sectors.
The second part of the semester is dedicated to self-driven research, prototyping and iteration of your ideas focusing on audience and impact. We will analyze and practice methods of repair—the tangible and intangible alike—patching our tires, basic electronics, milling or printing new parts, Right to Repair policies and engaging with contemporary and historical cultures of DIY and internet-based open-source communities of practice. Our learning will happen through setting our studio culture together and developing communication and collaboration skills in individual and group projects, making in shops, and field trips within Rhode Island to apply concepts of reharvesting and repair at small and large systemic scales. Throughout the semester will be engaging with text, expressing reflections through writing, zines and discussions to develop a critical stance on sustainability and circularity and articulate how you see that applied in your own work and practice moving forward.
Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design, MID (2.5yr): Industrial Design
