Sophie Weston Chien uses textiles to educate, share stories

"The project came from an acknowledgement that there are different ways to communicate with folks and build community around spatial problems or ideas," Chien said. "Textiles are such an engaging and active way to learn about something through touching it."

For the past four years, Chien has been using tufted textiles as a dynamic design and environmental communication tool. She's applied fabric to maps to mimic natural systems and their interactions with the built environment, from expansive watersheds to mossy microclimates . Her textiles have also expanded into human communities, like in Boston where she with collaborator Amanda Ugorji created a large-scale textile series that maps the urban fabric and ecological resilience of Black neighborhoods .

And now, through her postdoctoral project, Making Homelands: Tufting San Lazaro Lifeways , Chien hopes to bring tufted textile story maps to the Front Range.

San Lazaro is a predominantly Latinx manufactured and mobile home community located in northeast Boulder. By gathering oral histories through workshops and conversations with San Lazaro community members, the textiles will act as a visual record of the residents' relationship to each other, their personal journeys and the changing ecology of their home.

"Some of the questions I've been asking throughout the process are how can the rugs themselves be a design tool? Can a textile be a site model? Can a city be a rug?" Chien said. "And now in my work with San Lazaro, I'm trying to figure out how the textiles can be a witness to things as well."

Receiving the Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity for the 2024-2025 academic year provided Chien with the time and resources to carry out this research. The position, which provides fellows with protected time for scholarship and research in preparation for a tenure-track faculty position, is not only new for ENVD, but is also unique in the field of design academia.

"Design scholarship doesn't easily fit into academic structures," she explained. "As designers, you're image makers, you're visualizers, you're thinking spatially. And so, for me as a postdoc, I'm really excited because it's given me the space to do the kind of research that I want to be doing, that I think designers should be doing."

Chien's design journey began at home, raised by an architect father and landscape architect mother. After completing three professional degrees in architecture, landscape architecture and planning, she developed a keen awareness of both the potential and limitations of design.

"I think there's a lot of people that come out of design school that want to do really impactful things that actually change the world. But if your client isn't a good client, your project is not going to be good," she said.

Design projects can be significantly limited by the entities that fund the work, approve the design plans and have power over the outcome of the project. In her professional practice, this knowledge encouraged her to seek out clients aiming to grow the structural capacity of people and industry in order to build better spaces. She calls this "design-organizing."

"I started learning about organizing because I was trying to understand how to build power, be it financial, be it social, to actually get better clients," she said. "That really gave me the ability to think about what it means to build movements alongside building physical spaces."

In her current postdoc position, design-organizing is exemplified through building strong foundations with the communities she works with, such as the San Lazaro residents. Through forming deep connections with project partners, engaging with community members and collaborating with other CU researchers and experts, she hopes to be an engaged researcher and a responsible teacher.

"I do think there's an obligation from us as educators, as researchers, to think about the future of the profession and how to change it," she said.

In Chien's vision, perhaps the future of design is yet to be tufted.

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