John is Associate Professor of Design Strategies, and serves as the Co-Director for the Transdisciplinary Design MFA program at Parsons and for the Consortium for Transdisciplinarity. He also co-founded the studios Collective Fabulation, Design for Living and Dying, and Libraries as Sites of Unconditional Hospitality. Previously, John served as Associate Director (2013-15), and Director (2016-18) of the Strategic Design BBA program at Parsons. In these leadership roles, John has worked to redesign curriculum and pedagogy to expand the possibilities for research with and through art, design and social practice.

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“I am most excited by and interested in the possibilities for transformation as catalyzed through the convergence of radical forms of aesthetic expressions, new technologies, multi-directional and inclusive learning communities, and social actions. I am eager to participate in educational settings that privilege questions over answers, process over product, experimentation over mere execution, and long-term effects over short term gain. My dedication to progressive learning communities is evidenced through my work with both undergraduate and graduate programs at Parsons and The New School, and beyond.

For nearly three decades I have worked with stories, images and narratives through myriad forms of expression and technology, co-creatively designing conditions for transformations toward greater justice and planetary health. This has included artistic and ethnographic work with people experiencing various stages of dying (End of Life project) and with public library workers serving communities impacted by incarceration, as well as research and design strategy with the Light Phone, while more recently my work has turned to explorations and methodological efforts for restorative justice with Indigenous, settler-colonial, and other nonindigenous people through critical and collective fabulation.

My recent monograph, Participatory Design and Social Transformation: Images and Narratives of Crisis and Change (Routledge 2022), references my research projects, proposes questions and offers theoretical and practical insights that explore how we might build alliances to engage in the co-creation of images and narratives contributing to transformations. This is proposed as an approach to learning through making–one that is particularly effective in grappling with complex social issues located where entry and access to more traditional forms of embodied participation are challenging. Foundational to my practice research are the use of improvisational, cinematic, virtual and artificial reality, and other technological methodologies for co-creating stories and spaces of belonging, camaraderie, and solidarity. Participatory Design and Social Transformation reflects on artistic- and design-based research through transdisciplinary praxis to look beyond the traditional and the siloed.

I participate in a constellation of efforts, directly and indirectly, actively seeking the participation of faculty, staff, and students from a diversity of experiences and perspectives, to evolve curriculum and pedagogy through ongoing commitments and actions for de-centering whiteness, anti-racism, critiques and actions against ongoing coloniality and damaging extractive practices, and evolving praxis (as a way of being) that models shared visioning and decision-making, even within contested institutional structures where unhealthy hierarchies might abuse power and where individualism is too often rewarded in ways that support systems of ownership, forms of policing, and exclusion.”

In 2016, John was awarded fellowship of the Graduate Institute for Design Ethnography and Social Thought (GIDEST) supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue his research for End of Life project.

John is an advisor and collaborator with The New School’s N Ventures . He has collaborated on a number of engagements, consulting leadership, conducting executive education, and leading multi-stakeholder workshops for industry-specific projects.

John is an affiliated faculty member of the Parsons DESIS Lab where he serves as researcher and experience designer. Recent work includes research, service design, and video ethnography for the project Libraries as Sites for Transformational Justice, exploring current and future library services with communities impacted by incarceration.