PROJECTS / STUDIO SESSIONS

Redesigning a World Around Belonging

01 BACKGROUND

Overview

Studio Sessions is an ongoing social-practice artwork and cultural platform created by artist and designer Erwin Hines through FUTURE IS COLOR®.

The project began in February 2023 with 25 chairs, a live jazz band, and a red neon sign inside the FUTURE IS COLOR® studio in Barrio Logan. What began as an intimate experiment in gathering has since evolved into a living ecosystem of music, movement, conversation, publishing, mentorship, and public space.

Rather than treating design as a means of promoting events, Erwin approached the gathering itself as the work.

The room, visual identity, music, frequency, furniture, lighting, artist relationships, invitation language, and ways people moved through the space were all treated as interconnected artistic materials. Together, they formed an evolving investigation into a central question:

What does it look like to redesign the world around belonging?

Studio Sessions is the physical response to that question—not as a speculative proposal, but as a practice people can enter, shape, and return to.

The Context

When Studio Sessions began, communities were still navigating the social effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital platforms had kept people visible to one another, but visibility had not necessarily produced intimacy. Many of the informal structures through which relationships form—shared tables, neighborhood rituals, chance encounters and dependable third spaces—had weakened or disappeared.

In San Diego, this disconnection was compounded by a transient population, rising living costs, fragmented creative communities, and a shortage of spaces where people could gather without being expected to purchase, perform, or already understand the social codes of the room.

The FUTURE IS COLOR® studio had originally been established as a workspace and fulfillment center. But people rarely treated it like a conventional store. They entered for clothing and remained for conversation. Over time, the studio became less transactional and more relational: part design lab, part living room, part informal cultural institution.

Through ongoing conversations with artists, young people, local businesses, and community members, Erwin identified several recurring needs:

Accessible and thoughtfully designed places to gather.
Consistent experiences capable of building relationships over time.
Greater connection between San Diego’s culturally distinct communities.
More infrastructure for emerging artists to develop audiences and sustainable creative practices.
Environments where people could arrive without the pressure to consume or perform.

The artistic challenge was not simply to produce another event.

It was to design conditions through which trust, recognition, and belonging could emerge.

Rather than treating design as a means of promoting events, Erwin approached the gathering itself as the work.

The room, visual identity, music, frequency, furniture, lighting, artist relationships, invitation language, and ways people moved through the space were all treated as interconnected artistic materials. Together, they formed an evolving investigation into a central question:

What does it look like to redesign the world around belonging?

Studio Sessions is the physical response to that question—not as a speculative proposal, but as a practice people can enter, shape, and return to.

From Garments to Gatherings

Erwin founded FUTURE IS COLOR® in 2020 as a design practice centered on clothing that carried ideas. Garments operated as prompts for reflection and dialogue, using the body and public space as sites of communication.

The deeper medium, however, was always conversation.

As the studio became a place where people lingered, Erwin began exploring how the ideas embedded in FUTURE IS COLOR® could move beyond objects and become spatial, participatory, and collective.

That possibility became tangible in early 2023 through conversations with Rich of Dreams & Ducats and musician Ruben Hernandez of Skate Jazz. Three weeks after discussing the possibility of live music in the studio, the first gathering took place.

Twenty-five chairs were positioned closely around the musicians. The room was illuminated by a red neon FUTURE IS COLOR® sign. There was no stage separating performer and audience. People arrived without knowing exactly what they were entering.

What they encountered was an atmosphere that allowed them to slow down, pay attention, and notice one another.

Within two sessions, it became clear that the project was responding to a need larger than the original experiment.

The Artistic Innovation

The central innovation of Studio Sessions is the treatment of gathering as both artistic medium and civic infrastructure.

Rather than producing a fixed object for an audience to observe, Erwin designed a flexible system completed through participation. The work exists through the relationships, improvisations, memories, and cultural exchanges that occur inside it.

Studio Sessions expands traditional ideas of design in several ways.

1. Design as Social Choreography

The project treats design as an ecosystem of visible and invisible decisions that influence how people move, listen, remain, and relate.

Furniture placement, proximity to performers, lighting, signage, breaks in programming, the absence of a mandatory purchase, and even the tone of an invitation can change whether a person feels like a customer, spectator, outsider, or participant.

The objective was not to control behavior, but to make connection more possible.

2. Access as an Ethic

Studio Sessions reframes accessibility as more than free admission.

A space may be financially accessible while remaining socially or psychologically closed. Erwin considered the less visible barriers that can make cultural environments feel exclusive: unfamiliarity, institutional codes, expectations of consumption, pressure to arrive with friends, and the feeling that one must perform a particular identity to belong.

The work was therefore designed to communicate that a person’s presence was sufficient.

People could come alone. They could speak, dance, sit quietly, leave early, remain late, or simply observe. Nothing had to be purchased or proven.

3. Consistency as a Creative Material

Most cultural programming is structured around isolated moments. Studio Sessions treated repetition itself as part of the artwork.

Weekly and recurring gatherings allowed familiarity to accumulate. Strangers became recognizable. Recognizable faces became relationships. The audience gradually shifted from consumers of programming into participants in a shared cultural practice.

Consistency transformed the project from an event into a social rhythm people could depend on.

4. Community as Co-Author

Erwin did not approach the community as a target audience for a predetermined vision.

Listening, observation, informal conversation, surveys, and collaboration became part of the design process. Programming evolved in response to how people were using the space and the different forms of connection they were seeking.

No single founder or organization can design belonging alone. Studio Sessions therefore operates as a work that remains open to revision by the people who inhabit it.

5. Black Music as Spatial Knowledge

The design philosophy of Studio Sessions is rooted in the lineage of Black cultural production.

Across history, Black music has functioned as archive, sanctuary, communication system, resistance practice, and space-making technology. Churches, jazz clubs, juke joints, warehouses, block parties, and dance floors were never only entertainment venues. They became environments in which people could gather, recognize one another, sustain joy, and rehearse freer ways of being.

Studio Sessions draws from this lineage without attempting to reproduce it aesthetically. It extends its underlying logic: music as a way to transform ordinary space into a container for collective possibility.

02 BUILDING AN ECOSYSTEM OF CONNECTION

Live Sessions

Live Sessions, including Jazz Night, are the emotional anchor of the platform.

Free and open to all ages, they create a consistent rhythm of live performance and shared presence. The closeness between musicians and audiences reduces the hierarchy of a traditional stage and allows the music to feel communal rather than presented at a distance.

Over time, attendees begin recognizing one another. The return becomes as meaningful as the performance.

Warehouse Sessions

Warehouse Sessions use dance, sound, and collective movement as forms of participation.

These larger gatherings acknowledge that conversation is not the only path into community. Some people connect through movement, physical release, shared rhythm, or the feeling of temporarily becoming part of a larger body.

Here, the dance floor becomes a space where individuality and collectivity can coexist.

The Listening Room

The Listening Room moves in the opposite direction.

Designed for approximately 20–30 people, each session centers an album, artist, theme, or question. Music is experienced with sustained attention, followed by facilitated reflection and dialogue.

The format creates room for slowness, vulnerability, disagreement, and complexity without requiring expertise or consensus. It positions listening not as passive reception, but as a relational practice.

Open Studio

Open Studio is the least programmed expression of the work.

The space opens as a cultural commons where people can read, work, browse the library, listen to music, rest, or simply remain in the ambient presence of others.

There is no agenda and no required outcome.

This unstructured format reflects one of the project’s core insights: sometimes the most meaningful contribution a space can make is to allow people to exist without asking anything from them.

Had To Be There

Had To Be There extends Studio Sessions into the form of publishing.

The book documents the project’s first years through photography, essays, community testimony, visual systems, and reflections on space, connection, belonging, and the politics of gathering.

Rather than functioning only as an archive, the publication makes the methodology legible. It translates the lived project into a framework other artists and communities can study, reinterpret, and build upon.

03 DESIGNING THE CONDITIONS

Designing the Conditions

The visual and physical systems of Studio Sessions were not developed as ornamentation around the programming. They were part of the programming.

Erwin created a restrained and flexible visual language capable of moving between jazz performances, listening experiences, dance gatherings, gallery programs, garments, institutional partnerships, and publications without prescribing a single subcultural identity.

The goal was coherence without uniformity.

A disciplined typographic system, repeatable layouts, spatial warmth, wood surfaces, intimate seating, hi-fi sound, red illumination, books, objects, and recurring visual cues helped establish familiarity across formats.

Within the physical studio, the room was organized more like a living room than a venue. Couches invited lingering. Books communicated that time could stretch. The sound system prioritized attention over background noise. Warm materials softened the industrial architecture.

Each decision asked the same question:

What allows a person to lower their defenses and arrive more fully?

Design, in this context, became philosophy made visible—a way of communicating care without giving instruction.

04 WHAT THE WORK MADE POSSIBLE

Impact

Studio Sessions demonstrates that cultural impact does not have to be separated from artistic rigor.

Since beginning in 2023, the project has welcomed tens of thousands of participants across intimate, recurring, and large-scale experiences. It has provided paid opportunities and platforms for local musicians, DJs, curators, facilitators, photographers, designers, and emerging cultural leaders.

It has also created new pathways between younger audiences and established institutions, including ongoing collaborations with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

The clearest measure of the work, however, is found in how participants describe what the space makes possible:

96%
96% report feeling a sense of community.
94%
94% report feeling safety and belonging.
92%
92% believe Studio Sessions programs are important to the health of their community.
“The place that helped me reconnect with myself and my community.”

A Living Work

Studio Sessions remains intentionally unfinished.

Its formats continue to change. Community members move from attendees to collaborators, hosts, artists, and program leaders. Institutional partnerships extend the work into museums and public spaces. Publications transform lived experience into shared knowledge. New programs emerge from listening rather than predetermined expansion.

The project is not designed around a fixed image of community. It is designed to remain responsive to the people who enter it.

That responsiveness is central to the artistic practice.

Studio Sessions proposes that a gathering is never only a gathering. It is a site where culture is created, relationships are sustained, and possible futures are practiced in public.

The work asks what becomes possible when design is not used simply to describe a better world, but to construct temporary, repeatable spaces where that world can already be felt.

Belonging is an architecture. Studio Sessions is an ongoing attempt to build it.