Residency: MICA
Maryland Institute College of Art (2025)
During the 2024–2025 academic year, Sloan Leo Cowan served as Designer‑in‑Residence for the Social Design graduate program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
In this role, they collaborated closely with master’s students and faculty to develop and pilot “dinner as social practice art and social technology”: a series of workshops, studio critiques, and communal meals that treated shared dining rituals as a medium for collective inquiry, relational infrastructure, and design experimentation
Over the course of the residency, he led hands‑on sessions—ranging from sensory mapping exercises around the table to speculative “menu prototyping” labs—that invited participants to surface the social, emotional, and political dimensions of everyday gatherings.
On March 10, 2025, they presented the residency’s key findings in a free, on‑campus event, sharing both theoretical insights and practical outcomes with the broader MICA community.
