Ayako Maruyama

CREATIVE ENGAGEMENT CONSULTANT

Ayako Maruyama is a Filipina-Japanese designer, teacher, and illustrator. She centers intentional collaboration, reflection, maintenance and repair in her practice. Ayako is the 20Q Hub Curator, directing the design of the space that will house DS4SI’s 20th year celebrations and programming this fall. 

Her practice has been shaped by her work with DS4SI where she joined Lori and Kenny in 2012. Her early work focused on designing and producing Action Lab, the first of many DS4SI Creative Labs. She led the design and production of the Go Boston 2030 Visioning Lab, an unprecedented public space for Boston residents to express their vision for the city’s 15-year transportation plan. She grew to be the Design Lead until 2019, and continues to work with the Studio. Ayako co-authored and co-illustrated Ideas Arrangements Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice, which offers a framework for imagining new arrangements. Ayako’s work with DS4SI on Social Emergency Response Centers has been exhibited at Project Row Houses Round 48: Beyond Social Practice and the Designing Peace exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, which traveled to The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco.

Ayako currently teaches the Fanned Obsolescence Studio that ties into her research on repair culture in the Philippines, the future of cooling, and the geopolitics of our manufacturing legacy. She collaborates on a project with Markus Berger, called reharvest repair: a circular economy research project. She is a Board Member at the University of Orange in New Jersey, a free school of restoration urbanism founded in 2008 and building on a 64-year history of progressive organizing. Ayako has taught at Boston University’s City Planning and Urban Affairs graduate program and is currently a professor of Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design.