At INK, our design ethos looks beyond technology’s limits, and we reimagine how tech can be more empathetic in the ways we communicate, draw, and design. Technology is everywhere around us, and right now there is a lot of technology that is getting between us. Empathy Tech can help us see through that.

We use the term “Empathy Tech” to define our mode of practice at INK, which is to break through technology’s limits so that we can recall the notion of time, experience a sense of place and ecology, recognize our senses and the tactility of materials, and can feel humanity in the work that we do.

Empathy Tech manifests itself in the physical landscapes we build.

CUT|FILL is an Open Space unConference for landscape architecture held virtually and annually on QiqoChat. Modeled on a non-hierarchical method for convening people around difficult topics, participants are invited to speak and share, pose questions, or ask for input.

First convened in 2020 and in collaboration with The Urban Studio, CUT|FILL brought together over 600 students and professionals during an unprecedented global pandemic around a central question: Can we afford to be stagnant while the world is changing?

CUT|FILL is participatory and collaborative; the agenda is created live each day of the conference by attendees present at the opening of each day. Anyone who wants to host a session that day will announce the topic and choose a space and time. You choose which breakout session to attend.

The purpose of CUT|FILL is to identify the changes we want to make to our own profession and also to take the first steps in doing so. Rather than having a preset agenda, the event begins as a blank canvas for the participants to fill. The event is defined by the call to action within the invitation. The key to success for CUT|FILL is in creating space so that as many voices as possible can be heard and to help everyone feel welcome. For this reason, people show up in large numbers and are eager to participate in a two-day conference which has no agenda. Everyone is free to move in and out of the conversations where they could learn from or contribute to the most. This amounts to a transformative experience for those who attend, and participants co-create hundreds of pages of notes together.

CUT|FILL is a project that builds infrastructure for online collaboration, where participants are invited to speak and share, pose questions, and ask for input. From concept to implementation, this is a communications project at its core. It leads to a powerful co-creation of provocative thoughts, discussions, actions, and social and emotional change for the field of landscape architecture.

INK works to communicate the vision for this event, however, the most important communication is that which we enable -- conversations among the landscape architects who step forward to connect with each other and learn in a personal and authentic way.