About WITNESS Labs
An interdisciplinary research, teaching, and experimentation initiative. We work toward a more sustainable, resilient, and environmentally responsible built environment.
A testing lab with a sandbox
WITNESS Labs investigates, develops, tests, and evaluates materials, technologies, environmental systems, and design strategies. We do this through hands-on play, experimentation, fabrication, environmental monitoring, simulation, field research, and prototyping. WITNESS connects design questions with measurable evidence.
We bring together students, faculty, researchers, designers, engineers, industry professionals, and communities. Together we explore how things are made, how they perform, how they affect people and the environment, and how they might be improved. Our work extends beyond the physical lab to include digital research, computational tools, databases, environmental analysis, and community-based investigations.
WITNESS is not simply a makerspace, a fabrication shop, or an equipment-testing facility. Its purpose is to produce and share knowledge through systematic inquiry and experimentation.
Where we are now. WITNESS is growing out of years of collaboration across architecture, engineering, and design at Wentworth. Our first physical home, the Materials + Environmental Systems Laboratory, is in planning. Research is already underway in studios, independent studies, and partner labs.
Mission
WITNESS advances environmentally responsible and socially responsive design through interdisciplinary experimentation, testing, documentation, and sharing.
Students and faculty ask what we should design. They also ask harder questions. Does a proposed solution work? For whom, and where? What does it cost the environment? WITNESS gives them the space, tools, and structure to answer with evidence.
How research runs here
Independent studies, theses, undergraduate and graduate research, and faculty-led projects can join a WITNESS Research Cohort. Students on very different topics share milestones and meet weekly. One may test earth blocks while another builds a digital platform. Each keeps authorship of their own work.
Cohort meetings return to the same questions:
- What makes a research question meaningful?
- What is already known, and where are the gaps?
- What counts as evidence?
- How do we document uncertainty?
- What can we honestly conclude?
- How should we share what we found?
Partner with us
We look for collaborators. Partners help identify research questions, provide materials or data, take part in testing, evaluate prototypes, host field research, and carry findings into practice.
- Architecture, engineering, construction, and design firms
- Material manufacturers and fabricators
- Contractors and builders
- Material-testing labs
- Universities and research institutions
- Community organizations and environmental groups
- City and regional agencies
Support the lab
Funding builds the physical lab and keeps research moving. Support goes to space, testing and fabrication equipment, student research, and sharing what we learn.
Contributions can be financial. They can also be equipment, materials, facilities, technical expertise, or staff time. We measure success by the knowledge we produce and share: papers, datasets, prototypes, digital tools, exhibitions, workshops, and guidance for industry.
To talk about supporting WITNESS, contact the co-directors, John Voccio and N. Jonathan Unaka.