Andrew Todd Marcus

A studio for students who could already fabricate but had never been taught to design. NuVu's long-term students arrived proficient in process and tools; this prototype gave them the foundations. It was built as a model studio for NuVuX partner programs and as a training studio for curriculum designers, and it became a core studio, adapted since for students and for teachers. Seven exercises, each a day or two, each answering a piece of three questions: What is design? How do we design? How does design shape our world?

A studio built to test a new curriculum model: discrete learning modules that could be recombined as NuVu grew. It became the template for the studios that followed. The subject was the senses. Students asked how the layering of sensory exposure defines experience and memory, and how sensory information triggers bodily response, and worked through a progressive, data-driven sequence to design devices and installations that let a user experience the world through a sensory connection they had never felt. Unlike most NuVu studios, the final product was a proof of concept rather than a working prototype; the sequence was the point.

A multi-year studio series I conceived to produce a full-scale installation for the Louis A. DePasquale Universal Design Playground at Danehy Park, commissioned by the City of Cambridge. Over five studios, middle and high school students moved through the whole arc of an architectural project: conceptual abstraction exercises, sketch models, diagrams, presentation drawings, fabrication documents, budgets. They learned parametric modeling and the coordination a public commission demands, with city officials, landscape architects, engineers, fabricators, and disability advisors, and across the series they became one design team. They took part in construction administration and helped carry the project through installation.

The result is Pipe Dreams, an art-play sculpture that takes the park's history as a landfill and gives it back as an eroded storm pipe: a tunnel of curved wooden planks with window openings and integrated handholds, on the playground that Boston Magazine named Best Outdoor Play Space in 2024.

Cooking, eating, and sharing food is a basic biological and social act. In this studio students worked with and for Lee Cusack, a UX designer with spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, to understand what the most basic human need asks of someone with SQCP, and to design systems and devices for it. They were led through exercises in empathy, human-centred design, and contemporary performance art, and the studio ended as a performance: Breaking Bread, a ritualized sharing of bread built on intimate interactions, with small teams responsible for the food system, the central watering hole, the food-delivery beak, and the running of the performance itself.

An experimental studio that took NuVu's curriculum into biology, and asked how a technology like CRISPR could be handled in a conceptual studio. It was the first NuVu studio with a rigorous lab component, and it opened the way to later work in ecosystem design, living architecture, and genetics.

Bacteria in the body outnumber human cells ten to one. If biology can engineer those organisms for new functions, what new abilities could we have? Students began with a crash course in cell and molecular biology and genetics and ran a biosensor and genetics lab at BosLab, a cooperative laboratory. Then they imagined, designed, and built wearable bioreactors and proofs of concept: devices that house engineered living cells and work in symbiosis with the wearer.

Every game occupies its own spatial universe, and an architecture that governs play and sets the depth of the player's experience. How are those worlds imagined and made? Students began with game and architectural precedents and with critical reading of both, then used the tools of spatial description from architecture to conceive, physically develop, and digitally build a game in Unity with clear spatial ideas. Form-building exercises and orthographic and isometric drawings came first, then physical puzzles of spatial complexity, then the games. Two projects.

A series of short films for students, teachers, and partners. Sketching explains iterative sketching and diagramming as the core of the design process; NuVu coaches use it to learn the pedagogy, students to see the process, professional-development clients to approach project-based work. Studio Management Platform introduces the LMS and portfolio system that carried NuVu's pedagogy, curriculum, transcripts, and studio archive across the network, and was used by clients including the MIT Media Lab and the Wentworth Department of Architecture. The NuVu Toolbox series met a shop safety and productivity need: simple enough to train middle and high school students with no shop experience, and useful to partner-school teachers and clients as well.

A prototype program to put the new Citizen Schools Learning Framework into practice, training our own team and a first cohort of partner educators in the experience-based learning pedagogy and curriculum. I bootstrapped a shared, studio-based learning platform from off-the-shelf tools on a budget of $250, to show what a collaborative learning space could be; it ran synchronous and asynchronous sessions, peer learning, and community engagement. Module 1 gave educators the creative process from the inside: they developed projects of their own, collaborated, and brought components into their classrooms, and came out ready to run authentic experience-based learning with external mentors and activated communities.