Areté Sandbox programs hold second quarter workshop on interdisciplinary collaboration

Areté’s Sandbox Programs hosted its 2nd quarter workshop for its 2023 cohort of Sandbox Residents last July 19, with Brian Yulo Ng facilitating the workshop. 

Mr. Ng, a Singaporean and Filipino business leader, animation director, artist, and chef, shared insights from multiple interdisciplinary projects that he has engaged in, such as animation filmmaking, immersive art experiences, creative and ethical placemaking in land use development, and the culinary arts. 

The workshop sought to empower Sandbox Residents with diverse strategies on how to further engage with their projects through proper visioning and execution. It also offered the seven Sandbox Residency teams a platform to provide updates on their projects, which commenced in January 2023. 

The updates enabled project teams to spot connections and the potential for collaboration with each other. The Laro, Lingap, Laya team, for instance, with its eco-feminist trauma-informed approach to creative space-building, found intersections with projects like Baligtarin Mo!, which aims to encapsulate the voice of the Filipino youth regarding environmental issues based on their experience from participating in activities co-hosted by the project team.

Another related project is Sugat, whose aims include creating a podcast series for the youth that unpacks sustainable development from interdisciplinary perspectives and the lived experience of local communities.

These projects also resonate with Ang Gubat ang Guro, which hopes to come up with a Filipino concept of the forest, drawing from research of history, literature, popular culture, and folk and organized religion as practiced by Filipinos.

A fifth closely linked project is Biodiversity and Ecological Knowledge Integration for Sustainability (BEKIS) in Gleaning, which hopes to explore the different methods of analyses that can be used to study the relationship between local ecological knowledge of shellfish gleaners in Pagbilao, Quezon, and biodiversity.

The last two projects both take advantage of Areté’s Makerspace to design and create technology to help repair malfunctioning hospital equipment in Occidental Mindoro (in the case of the project Conducting a Hospital Equipment Inventory assessing damage and developing strategies to possibly Repair or upgrade or HIER).

The Eugenio Lopez Jr Makerspace also enables the robotics and archaeology team of the ArchaeoBot project to prototype their designs that can help automate some of the technical tasks in archaeological excavations.

Overall, the second quarter workshop inspired participating Residents to work on enhancing two aspects of their projects. The first is project visioning, so that the theme is evocative, the story is easy to connect to, and the concept is unique and has not been done before. 

The second is project execution, so that team assignments respect team members’ diverse skills and backgrounds, the project design considers both aesthetic and function, and lastly, systems are in place for testing and prototyping for implementation over time. The third quarter workshop hopes to build on these ideas by providing tips on mastering project communication that transcends disciplines, providing both potential project funders and the wider public easier access to the ideas and innovations being incubated in the Sandbox Residency.

For more information and updates about the Sandbox Programs, please visit: https://arete.ateneo.edu/programs.