Quick, pull out your calendar!

Move over, Taste of the Danforth / Caribana, the hottest events of the summer are here:

Saturday, August 15th: Course enrollment opens

Friday, August 21st: the irid Semester Preview Party (!!!) at New Stadium

We’d love for you to join us at the preview party for an interactive open house and introduction to our Teaching Fellows and their courses. But beyond showing off our fall offerings, we’re excited to just gather our nascent community, and hopefully weave some new connections between nodes in our iridescent web.

Get your tickets for the preview party here!

And now, we know you’re itching to hear, so without further ado…

Meet our Fall 2026 Teaching Fellows!

We were bowled over by the quality and range of the applications we received for our inaugural Teaching Fellowship. The Fellows we landed on stood out for their warmth, originality, and relevant foci on problems of personal and civic importance, and we are so proud to be working with them to incubate their fall offerings.

They are:

Justin Scherer, an improvisational synth musician who works by day for Wikipedia. His course will be on designing for uncertainty in the creative process — chance operations, improvisation, and more. 

Ruth Silver, a designer and systems thinker who has led her own innovation practice for decades (and the founder of HOTFLASH, a menopausal dance party). Her course will be on collectively reimagining retirement and aging. 

Aaryan Pashine, a software-tinkering graphic designer who co-ran a studio and collaborated on an independent thesis with:
Omama Mahmood, Omama, a land steward and angsty thinker/zinester working in museum design.
They are offering a pop-up class on making “digital gardens”, mindful spaces online where knowledge sharing and new ways of living can blossom. 

Together, the Fellows represent new ways of seeing age-old problems — and the willingness to create containers where we can see, and act differently. We are so excited to share their work with you this fall. 

What we’ve learned from our first application cycle

When we launched the Teaching Fellowship, we built it on a hypothesis and a dream: that there is an aching need in Toronto for a space that incubates intellectual curiosity, and that irid could create that for our dear city. As our inbox filled with far more applications than we had dared hope to receive, we became more and more certain that we were right. 

We are beyond grateful for the gift of these thoughtful proposals for courses, which spanned an incredible variety of topics from the emotionality of personal finance, to reimagining the city as a museum, to death in the digital domain. It’s clear that there exists a wide multiplicity of curiosities demanding to be sated through an institution like ours, and we were overwhelmed by a desire to support many more of them than we can realistically can at this stage. (We hope to create more opportunities for lighter touch, experimental offerings in the future – stay tuned!)

Through the process of dissecting these applications, we were able to refine our own understanding of what we think makes a course, an irid course, at its core. The short answer: an irid course is a question.

Many potential courses center on a question of skill (“How can I use a 3D printer to make assistive devices?”) or a cerebral exploration of existing ideas (e.g. “What does current literature say about consciousness?”) – but each of the proposals that really grabbed our attention represented a question that sat in the messy, intriguing, practical-yet-conceptual middle ground. A question like, “What would it look like to redesign the practice of friendship?”

A question that makes us say,

“We don’t know the answer to this… but if we find out, we/the city/the world will be better for it.”

We cannot express enough how honoured we are that so many of you took this leap of faith in vulnerably sharing with us your passions. We remain humbly inspired, and hope to keep engaging with all of them as our community grows and we continue collectively seeking the answers to life’s richest questions.

That’s it for today – keep it cool, and stay in school. 

Love,

Michelle and Chloë

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