This workshop, planned by The Center for Drawn Togetherness, was designed to help young people make real-world connections in an increasingly screen-based society. The event explored student participants’ relationship to technology as they each designed a set of hand-drawn and RISO-printed pinback buttons. All aspects of the workshop, including RISO printing and button-pressing, were student-led. Senior design students took on leadership roles during the event, helping younger students make effective button designs and use the equipment properly.

The workshop featured six “speed ideating” stations themed around commonly encountered digital buttons (for example, “delete”, “share”, and “search”) to prompt conversations about the ways participants use technology and how it impacts their lives both positively and negatively.

Like all events planned by The Center for Drawn Togetherness, this project aimed to use drawing to promote empathetic dialogue and honor a multiplicity of perspectives.

The Drawing Concert was the second in a series of three interlocking illustration events that took place during the Center for Drawn Togetherness Exhibition. All the events asked design students to work together in different ways, using drawing as a way to foster student connections in the Communication Design department at Texas State University.

Participants in the Drawing Concert drew on the walls of the exhibition using water-based markers. Prompts were refreshed every day inside the exhibition to inspire a variety of collaborative illustrations.

Participants in the Drawing Concert earned hand-drawn “currency” that was created in the Money Making Workshop. This currency could be spent in a student-run illustration pop-up shop stationed inside the exhibition.

In this workshop held at Texas State University, each student participant designed a set of 6 stickers. Each sticker was associated with a prompt that required students to have a conversation with another participant, encouraging them to meet and bond with other students in the Design program.

After the stickers were printed on the risograph printer, students created collaborative mini-books that included one sticker from each participant. Students were also encouraged to place finished stickers around campus as a way to translate the connections made in the workshop into their regular routines.

This workshop was designed to give students an outlet for their creativity free from the pressure of the traditional design classroom environment. It also served as an introduction to the risograph printer for many of the participants.

I founded the Center for Drawn Togetherness with the goal of exploring how drawing could foster connections between design students. Myself and a group of student collaborators worked under this name for about a year, planning and facilitating a variety of drawing events and workshops for the Communication Design department at Texas State University.

In this 2024 exhibition, we had a chance to imagine what the Center would look like if it were a physical institution. The finished gallery space featured 2D drawn “furniture,” a help desk, and souvenir mugs that student collaborators designed for the project.

The exhibition hosted a series of three interlocking illustration events. In the Money Making Workshop, participants designed a “currency” for the Center and learned how to print it on the risograph. Participants could earn this “currency” by participating in a Drawing Concert in which they responded to daily collaborative drawing prompts. In the final event, participants could spend currency in a student-run illustration pop-up shop.

The Money Making workshop was the first in a series of three interlocking illustration events that took place during the Center for Drawn Togetherness Exhibition. All the events asked design students to collaborate in different ways, using drawing as a way to foster student connections in the Communication Design department at Texas State University.

In this workshop, students were assigned partners and worked together to create a hand drawn currency for the Center that was printed on the risograph printer. Prompts were given at regular intervals to walk students through the thought process of designing a currency and to encourage them to get to know each other while they worked.

Visitors to the exhibition could earn the “currency” created in this workshop by participating in the subsequent event in the series, the Drawing Concert.

Like many people, I became focused on the concepts of community and “found family” during the COVID pandemic. I frequently grappled with loneliness and anxiety during this time and wondered where other were finding meaning, comfort and connection. I asked this question to approximately 50 friends and colleagues and combined their responses into a poster-sized illustration.

When I was offered the chance to install this poster in a gallery, I created a puzzle component to further explore the idea of community. Using my original poster as a reference, visitors to the gallery formed a (temporary) connection as they worked together to piece together the puzzle version of the image.