Iain is a transdisciplinary designer working at the intersection of creativity, ecology, and emergent systems. From an early age, Iain has refused the neat boundaries of disciplines, correct approaches to career paths, or the given borders of practices. This has led to his development of a unique approach to design as creative change-making that has evolved from over thirty plus years of experimenting in, across and beyond the spaces of Architecture, Product Design, Biology, Ecology, Art, Experimental Music, Philosophy, Fashion, Creativity Studies, Urban Planning, Ethnobotany, Food Studies, Complex Adaptive Systems, Dance, Systems Thinking, Social Entrepreneurship, and Commons Studies. 

These practices have led Iain into the spaces that can be roughly categorized as (1) collaborative community-based change-making, (2) Teaching and Research, and (3) experiments in radically rethinking what creativity is and how to engage with it. 

1. Collaborative Change-Making

In 1999 Iain co-founded the boundary-blurring design consultancy SPURSE with the goal of reimagining how architecture, design, and the arts could engage with pressing real-world issues in an open, collaborative, and emergent manner.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, SPURSE has been at the forefront of experimental design, ecological research, and innovation leadership. While developing ground-breaking ways to probe, catalyze, disrupt and re-imagine systems both large and small, they have collaborated with communities, organizations, governments, individuals and ecosystems, from the high arctic to inner cities neighborhoods in Bolivia by way of Poland, Japan, New Zealand, Lebanon and Mexico (to name a few of the many locations they have worked). Their award-winning projects reveal an astonishing range of creative solutions to effecting real change: from restaurants, wetlands, wayfinding apps, urban renewal programs, microbiology laboratories, cookbooks, buildings, everyday tools, social campaigns, festivals, clothing experiments, and more. 

In addition to carrying this work out with diverse communities, this work has been exhibited globally with major museums and small provisional community centers: The Guggenheim, MassMoCA, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Mystic Seaport Museum, MOCA Tucson, Sharjah Biennial, Aarhus Kunsthall, Women’s Studio Workshop, San Diego Art Institute, and Queens Museum.

This work has been widely discussed in newspapers, journals, and books from the NYTimes, ID, and Surface to The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography and The Interventionists, Experimental Geography, The New Farmers Alemac, and To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet.

2. Teaching and Academic Research

At the core of Iain’s teaching and research are the two questions: “What is creativity?” and “How do we engage with its processes effectively?” 

For the last 25+ years, Iain has taught, led workshops and lectured, and experimentally researched these two questions across a broad range of fields, ranging from architecture, art, dance, urban planning, geography, philosophy, design, ecology, business, engineering, entrepreneurship, library sciences, systems thinking, and food systems. He has been fortunate to be able to do this work at a broad range of universities and colleges globally, including MIT, Harvard University, Columbia University, Parsons, Yale, CCA, RISDI, NYU, UBC, Karl Franzen University, The University of Maine, Bates, The University of Venice, and Philadelphia University.

Currently, Iain teaches at Montclair State University, where he was brought in, alongside Jason Frasca, to help start a new entrepreneurship and innovation program. From this beginning, they developed and co-direct a university center for the research and teaching of creativity: The MIX Lab (MIX = Making and Innovating for X). The MIX Lab's mission is to foster and research creativity and innovation at all scales. Iain teaches courses in innovation design and creativity as well as collaborates on research projects into creativity and pedagogy (with a focus on early childhood creativity, exaptive design, technology, and enactive practices).

3. Transforming Creative Practices

The primary threads running through all of this connect to a powerful passion to move beyond the ecology of bad ideas and non-effective practices that have become the standard approach to creativity (individualistic, brain focused and idea driven) – and to collaboratively develop a broad alternative approach to creative practices that is emergent, collaborative, and effective.  

To this end, in 2018, Iain and Jason Frasca founded Emergent Futures Lab as a platform for the development and activation of a new creativity that is far more ecological, worldly,  emergent – and ultimately more effective. In this, Iain has played an important role in developing new concepts, practices, approaches, and environments. And these have been instrumental in EFL’s work as consultants with school systems, state transit systems, the field of health care, businesses, and government entities in preparing for a very different 21st century.

Now, as EFL broadens its scope to supporting communities of practice and ecosystems of learning, Iain’s focus is on, as he likes to put it:  “creatively designing novel collective processes to transform seemingly intractable problems into problems worth inventing for worlds worth making”.