About this site
This website serves as a living resource generated through the ongoing teaching practice of Laurel Schwulst. It archives materials for web visitors and students past, present, & future. You can learn more about Laurel's teaching practice below, or see her profiles at Yale and Princeton.
Laurel Schwulst began teaching at Yale School of Art in 2013.
Schwulst has an inventive approach to pedagogy. Her courses and exercises, such as her Coding from Life workshop, are frequently reproduced and cited. At Yale, she also created and developed syllabi for entirely new classes, including “Interactive Concrete Poetry” and “Writing as Metadata”.
In 2018, Schwulst was awarded an Inspiring Yale award for her work as a designer and teacher. That same year, she published an essay on Kickstarter’s The Creative Independent titled, “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?” which is frequently cited by designers, technologists, and educators around the world. In 2020, she published an ephemeral online anthology with her interactive design class at Yale called The Life and Death of an Internet Onion, which features writing from her students exploring the possibility of love online. The project was edited by Meg Miller and co-published by Are.na. Schwulst considers it an “oral history of the internet.”
Schwulst has been a long-time user and advocate of Are.na, a social researching tool popular among creative and academic people. She encourages students to build their own knowledge networks with Are.na, enabling them to “recognize patterns in their own thinking by revisiting things they’ve accumulated over time,” as Charles Broskoski, Are.na’s co-founder, described to Schwulst in an interview. By using outside tools like Are.na and inviting guests into her class, Schwulst considers her classes “workshops in conversation with the world” On the Are.na platform, Schwulst’s popular research collections include Eggs in Art and Design, Sparrows talking about the future of the web, and Wild Animals vs. Manmade Materials. Five years after the latter’s creation, Schwulst explained how other Are.na users’ erroneous contributions to her collection and her subsequent policing of them actually helped cultivate her specific research.
In 2020, Schwulst co-founded Fruitful School with designer and programmer John Provencher. Fruitful School is an independent web workshop that explores publishing to the web as an artistic practice, encouraging students to gradually grow their ideas as they learn new tools, methodologies, and histories.
In addition to Yale and Fruitful School, Schwulst has also taught design courses at Princeton, California College of the Arts, Rutgers, and has given lectures and workshops internationally.