Glissmann
The Observational Practices Lab (OPL) is a research platform at Parsons School of Design (The New School) that investigates how we look, document, and make knowledge visible across disciplines. Its mission is to create dialogue about observational practices and translate them into accessible, shareable methods and public outputs. OPL uses site-based approaches—treating cities and everyday settings as “living laboratories”—and develops tools that move between art, design, and the sciences.
Our core projects put this approach into practice: Atlas of Looking at Water starts from a humble glass of water to compare scientific and artistic ways of observing, catalyzing new visual methods and cross-disciplinary conversations. Atlas of Everyday Objects invited people worldwide to record the “objects of isolation” during the pandemic, building a participatory archive of daily life that might otherwise be overlooked []. Public programs like Talking About Seeing convene scholars and practitioners to examine the everyday as a site of inquiry and shared method.
COLLABORATION WITH SELENA KIMBALL, CO_FOUNDER, CO_DIRECTOR, DESIGNER