Our Visiting Fellows

Judah Armani, is an adjunct professor at The Royal College of Art and the Head of the Social Impact Challenge lab, he is the founder and principal of UK’s  Public Service Design Studio  and  InHouse Records. Judah has a background in product and service design, human rights and corporate social responsibility. InHouse Records is the world’s first record label to be launched in a prison and run by incarcerated individuals and graduates of the program. This award winning approach focuses on prisoners’ strengths, building on existing skills and developing new ones, through dialogue and a unique curriculum that is written by the prisoners themselves.

As a CfC Visiting Fellow, Judah is supporting a range of CfC projects.

Dara Benno is a transdisciplinary designer dedicated to advancing sustainable systems that address both environmental and social challenges through extensive research, strategic design, and innovation. Dara’s approach is rooted in her dedication to addressing complex issues with a critical mind and holistic perspective to create impactful interventions that foster lasting change. She applies her creative practice, and passion for hands-on making, to her systems-thinking mindset, designing accessible models, objects, and experiences that engage individuals and communities in consideration of a better tomorrow. Dara’s work spans consulting with organizations and brands on regenerative models and communication strategies, aligning environmental, societal, and business outcomes, particularly through the lens of the circular economy.

Dara holds a Master of Industrial Design from RISD and a background in sculpture and linguistics. She partners with organizations like The Level Up Project and the Genesis Center to work with and empower high school students and adults through a hands-on practice of art and design. Her workshops range in theme from reuse and disobedient practice to material research and curation of information itself as a creative body of work. Dara also brings her creative practice and life-centered approach to organizations focused on food recovery efforts, supporting initiatives to reduce food waste and food insecurity at both the household and community levels. Dara has exhibited her work investigating climate adaptation, everyday living, and community resilience at international design events including Dutch Design Week and FASHIONCLASH Festival.

As a CfC Strategic Design and Research Fellow, Dara is collaborating on the development of a design manual for the Polycene. She pulls from and expands on her research in climate risk and collaborative response, joining an effort utilizing art and design to envision the roles, norms, and values necessary for humanity to flourish. Dara has also joined the collaborative efforts of the CfC and community partners to combat the opioid epidemic and work toward designing care spaces free of stigma.

As Systems of Care Fellow, Jon advised the CfC on the future of its harm reduction portfolio and worked on several projects employing design principles and practices to address institutional stigma in health care. He developed the strategic partnership between the CfC and the Brown University Division of Addiction Medicine and was the lead organizer of the conference, “Whose Research? Ours! A Community-Led Conversation about Substance Use, Harm Reduction, and Recovery Research in Rhode Island.” More details at community-led.us

Jon launched a new research program for the CfC and directed two interdisciplinary work groups on “Systems Thinking from the Margins” (STFM). Classical systems theory inadvertently reproduces the perspective of power through the functionalist assumptions that systems are integrated, coherent, and directed. In complement and contrast, STFM starts with experiences of fragmentation, opacity, and incoherence and asks what theoretical resources the mapping and survival strategies used by those at the margins can provide for building systems in new ways. Jon’s focus within the STFM program was developing a new mathematical formalism, based on Bayesian decision theory and category theory, to represent the relationship between institution, algorithm, and Knightian uncertainty.