Intermediary Softness
Energy Transformations
Supported by the Somerson Sustainability Innovation Fund
Supervisor: Debbie Chen
Research Team: Lauren Foster Davis, Jae In (Samuel) Choi, Yang Tian
Role: Graduate Research Assistant
Intermediary Softness, Assistant Professor Debbie Chen’s ongoing project, examines infrastructural systems as critical cultural technologies in addressing climate change.
The project is interested in pivoting away from understanding infrastructure as bureaucratic, hard, and fixed towards a framework that appreciates these systems as interdependent, flexible, and in need of care. To be intermediary is to serve as a link, a mediator, a reconciliatory agent. To become intermediary is to acknowledge that there are conditions to reconcile, especially when imagining alternative infrastructural regimes. In response, Intermediary Softness offers an infrastructure of resistance and relief, of happy limits and voluntary discomforts.
With this new chapter, we examined the intersection of bathing culture and passive solar systems. Looking at multiple scales and temperatures of bathing typologies, the range stems from cold plunges to floating river saunas.
Take a dip with us!
Supported by the Somerson Sustainability Innovation Fund
Supervisor: Debbie Chen
Research Team: Lauren Foster Davis, Jae In (Samuel) Choi, Yang Tian
Role: Graduate Research Assistant
Intermediary Softness, Assistant Professor Debbie Chen’s ongoing project, examines infrastructural systems as critical cultural technologies in addressing climate change.
The project is interested in pivoting away from understanding infrastructure as bureaucratic, hard, and fixed towards a framework that appreciates these systems as interdependent, flexible, and in need of care. To be intermediary is to serve as a link, a mediator, a reconciliatory agent. To become intermediary is to acknowledge that there are conditions to reconcile, especially when imagining alternative infrastructural regimes. In response, Intermediary Softness offers an infrastructure of resistance and relief, of happy limits and voluntary discomforts.
With this new chapter, we examined the intersection of bathing culture and passive solar systems. Looking at multiple scales and temperatures of bathing typologies, the range stems from cold plunges to floating river saunas.
Take a dip with us!
2025-2026
