A Steamship Feast. On February 14th, in addition to our usual service in the Tavern, we’re hosting a feast upstairs. Sit side-by-side at long tables in our barn, eat plates of slow-cooked Steamship Round (google it), and sway to music with dessert.
Tickets and full menu for the Feast are available here.
To book for Valentine’s for our usual fare on the 14th, book here.
Our saucy lemon pudding is topped with preserved black currants grown on Walnut Grove Farm in Staatsburg, in sunnier times.
News from Mount Lebanon
Stissing House has a strong affinity for the Shaker principle of utilitarian design–functional and also beautiful in its simplicity. We’ve been so honored to support likeminded makers through our ongoing Craft Feast series. People who are dedicated to creating enduring designs across a variety of mediums.
You can imagine our delight to connect with Rachel Robbins, co-founder of Tangible Mind (launched June 2024) and a Shaker Museum board member. She has a deep belief in the importance of embodied cognition: the idea that we learn things not just with our brains, but with our bodies and with generative energy (i.e., making or creating). Through her strategy and design work, including early-stage AI, as well as teaching at prestigious institutions like Parsons and Princeton, Rachel brings a truly unique perspective on the intersection of emerging technology and human-centered design. Her intention for Tangible Mind came from a deep concern about the physiological impacts of rapid technological advancement, and a desire to create more conscientious, heart-centered approaches to innovation.
One of Rachel’s first projects for Tangible Mind is in collaboration with the Shaker Museum and the historic Mount Lebanon Shaker Village which she describes as “hauntingly beautiful, with a kind of energy to it–like an archeological site.” This summer, at the Mount Lebanon Forge building, they will host a two-week residency for three makers, technologists and a chef who will collaborate using emerging ways of making–true to the Shaker’s legacy of combining innovation with purposeful simplicity.
Sign up for their newsletter to be notified when tickets are available for an exclusive dining experience, “The Forge Chef’s Table,” a culmination of the Forge residency, later this summer. Guests will be able to engage with craftspeople, technologists, and the resident Chef over a meal and consider these concepts together. Please continue reading below an excerpt from our enlightening conversation with Rachel.
How does the Shaker ethos inspire and/or inform the work that Tangible Mind is doing?
I am consistently inspired by the profound wisdom of the Shakers on simplicity of form, community values, and the honesty of utility. There are so many great lessons to be learned on innovation and emerging technology by looking to our heritage. History gives us so many gifts, not the least of which is who we are today. Tangible Mind is informed by the honesty of materials, the connection to the land, and the importance of community values - drawing inspiration from the Shaker ethos.
How might the intersection of traditional and emerging ways of making create positive social innovation and collective transformation?
Having spent almost two decades working in emerging technology and helping businesses innovate, I saw firsthand how new technologies can change the shape of human interaction, influence culture, and impact society. We as humans have always had tools, and always responded to our environment with creative and inspired ways of enhancing the human experience. By looking to the past, by understanding why certain traditions persist, and by questioning what should be carried forward of those traditions as we create new ways of making, we can begin to have a holistic view of innovation.
The approach that we take at Tangible Mind utilizes the learnings from the long view of history (think evolutionary biology and our animal brains) incorporated with material craft and emerging ways of making to question how machines and manufacturing and the systems that provide the scaffolding for society might better work for society. And we invite you to think about this with us. We do this through exploring materiality with our residency program, exploring the developing brain, and how we learned through our educational programming, and through looking at ways that current systems are broken through our social innovation programming.
Why is the idea of embodied cognition so important in today’s human and technological landscape, and what role do you hope Tangible Mind will play in furthering it?
Embodied cognition and extended mind theory are fascinating, especially in the context of emerging technology! If you think about the last time that you saw a scary movie, or if you’ve ever walked into a room where someone has just been laughing, you can sense the feeling of the room before you actually think about it. These are really good examples of different ways in which physical intelligence manifests drying a lot of inspiration from the work of Anne Murphy Paul, Andy Clark, and Megan O’Gieblyn, there are some incredible emerging thinkers that combine ideas from eastern philosophy on interconnectedness with disciplines such as cognitive sciences, psychology, technology, and society, and neuroscience.
It allows us to think about intelligence, not just as something that is trapped inside of the brain, but as something that is fully experiential, embodied, and squishy. The plasticity – the flexible nature of the mind – means that it is affected by who you are with, your physical environment, and the plethora of inputs that the body takes in from sunlight to temperature to movement to memory in a beautifully orchestrated series of embodied data that all feed to the shifting nature of human intelligence. It’s quite fun to consider! And we’re excited to be able to explore this in partnership with our educational, museum, and academic partners as we create a test kitchen for embodied cognition.
As someone with experience in the early stages of AI, how do you envision using AI or other advanced technologies to support, or work alongside, the human-centered work that Tangible Mind is doing?
In many ways, artificial intelligence is already modifying the way that we do our work. This is something that we see across all industries. For us, we are utilizing them for all sorts of things from meeting notes and drafting documents to helping synthesize and understand data from multiple sources for things like impact models and strategic planning.
Apart from the administrative ways that AI is helping us with everyday tasks, artificial intelligence is integral to who we are as an organization. Having come from an AI start-up prior to moving into the nonprofit space, I became very interested in the way that society can provide feedback to those creating technology that changes the world. Any of us who have been alive since 2010 have seen this happen with the mass adoption of smart phones. It’s hard to even imagine a time before they were in our lives. They’ve become so central to how we live. It was clear with the mass adoption of GPT technology that this would be a societal change that was equally as seismic.
By working with artists who operate in technology spaces in partnership with people who operate in traditional craft spaces, we hope to explore these questions through residencies, community programming, and in conversation with each other.
This is an exciting year one! Beyond the maker-centered work you’re doing this year, what is your broader, future hope for the organization and its reach?
As we look to the horizon, there are so many exciting things coming into view! We are launching a partnership with Harvard Kennedy School in the coming weeks that will include an in-depth understanding of the role that art and design play in social innovation. The partnership will provide us with an impact measurement model that helps us understand what’s working and not working. The partnership with the Shaker Museum will allow us to explore ideas of materiality, heritage craft, and innovation through this uniquely American lens. We’ve also launched a Montessori curriculum for early childhood education called the “Timber of Nature” inviting pre-K students into hands-on learning. We’re excited to be expanding that curriculum from two schools to 60 schools, and hopefully bringing it from Cambridge, Massachusetts to the Hudson Valley. It’s exciting to create experiences, both programmatically and in terms of donor engagement, that allow people to see first hand the power of making and the power of collective action.
Why is this work so important to you, personally?
My father was a Vietnam vet. He was drafted into Vietnam, and when he returned home from the war, in many ways, he brought the war home with him. I remember the physiological shift that happened for him when he rediscovered his interest in carpentry, and started volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. The combination of generative energy, the material satisfaction of making something, and the social satisfaction of helping others brought him back to himself. I believe deeply in the power of making. For me it’s something that is integral to who we are as humans, and I’ve seen firsthand its ability to transform. This is something that I would like to make accessible broadly, and would like to continue to inquire about and explore. We, as a society, tend to think of intelligence as something thought based, but there’s so much potential if we begin to think more kinesthetically, and collectively.
Why is it important, now more than ever, to preserve human creation?
For those of us in the knowledge worker economy, we have given much of our time to digital experiences. If we think about the role of a screen and informing our view of the world, and the ways that we have consigned over this perception through a mediated experience, it’s really quite profound. Huge swashes of our time are spent, gazing at the world through a piece of glass on a screen.
As we think about content that is generated from our collective voices through artificial intelligence models and through technologies that emulate reality, it is so important that we maintain contact with those things that keep us grounded in human experience. Through tradition, through craft, through handmade things that provide sustenance to ourselves, to our families, to our communities, we can reconnect with those essential things that connect us to our more human selves.
How can we as individuals support your work and get involved?
Your support and involvement makes a world of difference—a gift to Tangible Mind empowers us to make a meaningful impact in our community. Thanks to a very generous matching challenge from Jim and Alice Kosis, every dollar you contribute in 2025 will be doubled. Additionally, by making a significant gift and joining our Founder's Circle, you’ll become part of a visionary group of philanthropic leaders shaping the future of Tangible Mind during its inaugural year. If you have any questions, or would like to explore ways to contribute, please don’t hesitate to contact rachel@tangiblemind.org. Together, we can build a legacy of positive change!