Associate Professor Jane Wolff, Assistant Professor Justine Holzman and alumna Sandra Cook (MLA 2017) were among the featured speakers who presented at the symposium "Fresh Water: Design Thinking for Inland Water Territories," September 13-15 at the University of Illinois.

As written on the University of Illinois' website:

Fresh Water: Design Thinking for Inland Water Territories is an interdisciplinary design symposium addressing regional, territorial, and continental water issues across inland North America. The geographic contexts and intellectual sites for the symposium—the major inland (non-coastal) watersheds of the Mississippi, the Great Lakes Basin, St. Lawrence, and the Nelson riversheds—remain under-explored in design research.
 

Wolff, Holzman, Cook participated in the Plenary, WATERBODIES. The symposium also displayed work from On The Pond, an exhibit on the ecological impacts of catfish farming that Holzman created with Forbes Lipschitz.

Holzman is part of the Dredge Research Collaborative (DRC) with Sean Burkholder, Brian Davis, Rob Holds, Tim Many, Brett Milligan, and Gena Wirth. An independent non-profit organization, DRC "aims to improve sediment management through design research, building public knowledge, and facilitating transdisciplinary conversation." Holzman's research focuses on landscape infrastructure for regional design, responsive technologies in landscape architecture, and the epistemic history of scientific landscape modelling.

Wolff's design research investigates the complicated landscapes that emerge from interactions between natural processes and cultural interventions; its goal is to articulate terms that make these difficult (and often contested) places legible to the wide range of audiences with a stake in the future.

Sandra Cook is a landscape designer at Forrec Limited in Toronto and is an independent landscape researcher. Click here to read our Q&A with Cook on the transition from school to work.