About
To Cowan, design is a way of orienting toward creating change, and he creates strategies and practices to find shared language and frameworks that allow organizations to be more intentional about community design, strategy, and engagement. To that end, he founded FLOX Studio Inc., a community design and strategy studio that partners with philanthropic institutions and social impact organizations to co-design meaningful gatherings, networks, and initiatives for change.
Rooted in Black feminist theory, Afrofuturism, and social justice, FLOX supports organizations and formations as they navigate change and reweave their community, one conversation at a time.
Under Cowan’s leadership, FLOX Studio’s partnerships include The New School, Movement Voter Project, Wikimedia Foundation, the Ms. Foundation For Women, The New York Women’s Foundation, National Institute for Reproductive Health, The Opportunity Agenda, Fondation CHANEL, Women’s Donor Network, the YMCA of the USA, and others.
*Photo by Wenting Gu (2021)
Cowan’s commitment to community and social justice was nurtured by early mentorship from feminist luminaries Barbara Smith and Naomi Jaffe. This grounded their practice in community facilitation methodologies, which they have used to support groups ranging from The Audre Lorde Project to Resource Generation.
In January 2020 Cowan was named the inaugural Designer-in-Residence at the School of Visual Arts Design for Social Innovation program, where they developed and launched Community Design for Leaders (CDL), a learning lab for design practitioners looking to orient their practice towards mutuality and justice. Cowan served as an adjunct professor of nonprofit management at NYU Wagner’s Graduate School of Public Service for seven years and teaches occasionally at The New School and the School of Visual Arts, in their Design for Social Innovation and Products of Design programs.
Cowan is a Forbes contributor whose writing explores facilitation, organizational development, and community design. Their essay “The Infrastructure of Care: Community Design, Healing & Organizational Post Traumatic Growth” was published in the 2022 anthology The Black Experience in Design, which spotlights teaching practices, research, stories, and conversations from a Black/African diasporic lens. Their chapter “Queering service design: toward a truly human-centered design orientation,” written in collaboration with Mari Nakano, is forthcoming in a new service design handbook edited by Lara Penin.
A proud graduate of the University at Albany, Cowan has over 15 years of experience facilitating and managing social impact staff & volunteer teams. In their early career as a relationship management strategist in the nonprofit sector, they raised $20M for a wide range of organizations advancing LGBTQI human rights globally, supporting formerly incarcerated individuals, and housing youth. They later served as the Director of Board Relations for the Environmental Defense Fund and the Chief of Staff for the Trust for Public Land, where they facilitated the development of the 2020–2025 strategic plan “The Power of Land For People.”
Cowan formerly served as the Board of Directors’ Governance Chair for the Ms. Foundation For Women, the Echoing Green Fellowship evaluator, and the Core77 Design Awards Social Impact Jury Captain. He most recently served on the board of the Design Trust for Public Space until February 2024. Currently, Sloan Leo is the designer in residence for MICA’s graduate program in social design and the community design mentor for The New Museum’s New Inc accelerator.
Connect with them on LinkedIn or at info@floxstudio.com.