sue borchardt – research artist

Sometime in 2011 I started playing in the space of using animation as a way to make sense of the world. Every once in a while I try to take stock and create a catalog of all these animations. None of the catalogs is complete but they still give me a great sense of accomplishment. The image that comes to mind is Sysiphus pushing a boulder up a hill. From Sysiphus’ perspective (am I spelling that right?), all the animating starts to feel the same: an endless loop of research, script-writing, drawing, animation, editing, scoring, sub-titling, promoting,… and if the camera pans out you see that out of the side of Sysiphus’ mountain there is a spool of narrative, or garden crops, or software, or knitting… whatever it is that is his work in the world.
So below are two attempts at panning out and viewing “the knitting” that has emerged so far. In both of the catalogs below you can click on an entry and if the animation is publicly available (i.e. my contract does not preclude me from sharing) then a link is provided to the animation so you can watch.

I made a tabular catalog in airtable (a user friendly no-code database platform).

… and a more visually presented catalog created using the mapping platform kumu. One can create maps in kumu with no code but I found the learning curve steep. If you want to avoid creating an unusable hot mess, make sure you understand the (not-so-intuitive) architecture and terminology kumu uses. If you want to get fancy it helps to be comfortable with CSS at least.

Sue Borchardt Bio

In the Fall of 2023 I started teaching a course on creativity at Towson University. A year later, I began an MFA in experimental animation. At the end of my first year as a studio art student my artistic direction continues to shift, lately towards installation using a rubbery food-based bioplastic and LED lights. Before that I was a freelance research artist, making animated short videos, telling stories about ideas, research, and ways of making sense of things.

A bit about how I got here: My pre-professional life was almost exclusively focused on art, but a pivot in my early college years led to a professional life that was decidedly tech. I put a BS in Electrical Engineering to use designing and prototyping user interfaces for the first generation of color radar displays for the Navy, and later query tools and maps for the Human Genome Database as a software engineer.

After a fun, but perhaps not-so-fulfilling 15 years, I left software. A liminal era marked by twists and turns landed me at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE) to learn about learning, initially through the lenses of neuroscience, biology, and phenomenology. At HGSE, I was captivated by social and co-constructive perspectives on the question of why, whether, and how adults continue to learn and grow (individually and collectively) and ended up spending several years as a teaching fellow in a course called Group Learning. It was a wildly paradoxical context, focused both on how we as individuals learn IN groups, as well as how groups themselves are learning organisms – whether teams, families, communities, or societies. I pretty much look at every challenge as a learning challenge — even our seemingly intractable political and social issues.

I left HGSE in 2012 with a Masters in Human Development and Psychology, but I didn’t really leave. I joined the Learning Innovations Lab (LILA) where, for 7-ish years, I continued to explore the tensions between theory and practice. It was at LILA that I started using animation as a way to document the insights and puzzles that emerged as LILA members (chief learning officers and other organizational learning leaders) explored new research and practice. As a result, animation has become a core medium for me for putting sense-making into service — integrating art, ideas, technology, storytelling, and user experience.

Though I have fledged the LILA nest, I continue to deepen my skills in using animation and visual narrative as a means of revealing and deepening shared knowledge. My belief that most challenges are learning (or unlearning) challenges has only deepened over the years, sparking an interest in sensemaking tools, models, and frameworks like the cynefin framework, Wardley (strategy) mapping, polarity mapping, and design thinking tools.

While I was a one-person shop (handling script-writing/editing, drawing, animation, scoring, and video editing) I depended on collaborators for the up-front sense-making that serves as the raw material. Around 2020, I shifted away from contracts as it seemed to limit access to important knowledge and thinking by being accessible only inside organizations or behind paywalls. Working collaboratively allows me to make my work is available online to anyone who wants to watch it (no pay-walls).

Here are some nice things people have written about me and my animations

“I was impressed; the videos concisely depicted ideas and explained concepts in a visually engaging and were easy to understand.”

“I am WOWed by what you’ve done here!! I so appreciate how the visuals bring to life and offer more potential for a deeper understanding of the words.”

“I think the way you present your insights – as academic and rigorous as they are – is totally non-threatening and readily accessible to even casual viewers who may not be totally engaged. The videos seem to have the capacity to almost stealthily change attitudes and perceptions for the better, and ergo greatly improve group dynamics of all stripes. Can you tell I’m impressed?”

“You were the glue that kept us together. Thank you for your generosity, energy and creativity.“

some of the places on the interwebs that I have some presence…