Creative Research
Cowan’s creative research practice explores the emerging field of queering, with a specific application to service design. Their work in “The Contemporary Service Design Handbook” portends the capacities and capabilities necessary to queer design, and it will be published by Bloomsbury Press in January 2026.
A frequent writer and lecturer, Cowan has been a featured speaker at NYCxDesign; the Van Alen Institute, the Design Trust for Public Space; Design For America; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; and The New School’s Parsons School of Design. He has also appeared as a guest on NYCxDesign’s Mic podcast, Revision Path with Maurice Cherry, and The Human Centered Design Podcast. They were the keynote speaker for the School of Visual Arts’s 2021 Art & Activism symposium.
As an artist, they were awarded a 2020 Queer.Archive.Work residency, where they produced QUEERBOOK, a community-sourced artbook archiving stories of queer community building in the era of COVID-19 and America’s great reckoning. Their 2020 mixed-media installation “A Watermelon for Leo”, was presented at Pen + Brush Gallery (NYC) and reviewed in Whitewall magazine.