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Entrepreneurship at the Margins presents creative business education as a form of pedagogical research rather than a pipeline toward profit or venture-capital scale. Developed through ENPR-200-02: The Entrepreneurship Mindset, this project investigates how artists and designers build sustainable creative practices, circulate value, and engage public space while operating at the margins of dominant economic models.

Rather than focusing on startup outcomes or financial success, this research frames entrepreneurship as a public, ethical, and cultural practice. It asks how creativity is taught within an art and design school, who benefits from dominant entrepreneurship frameworks, and what alternative models of scale, sustainability, and accountability might emerge when value is not measured solely by growth or extraction.

The project uses pedagogy itself as a research method. Through critical annotation of canonical entrepreneurship texts, visual mapping of value circulation, and comparative institutional research into creative business programs, the work makes visible the assumptions embedded in mainstream entrepreneurship education. Marginalia, diagrams, and process documentation function as research artifacts that expose friction, refusal, and alternative imaginaries.

Presented at the Research Open House as an open research environment, the exhibition emphasizes inquiry over conclusion. Visitors encounter annotated texts, wall-based maps, and archival materials that trace how creative labor generates cultural, social, and institutional value beyond profit. The project contributes to ongoing conversations about how art and design schools can prepare students to sustain creative practice in complex economic environments and positions Pratt as a site for rethinking entrepreneurship education in ways that are ethically grounded, publicly engaged, and responsive to creative practice today.

"In the forgotten corners of our digital landscape lie fragments of our collective past: broken links, abandoned pages, and obsolete platforms slowly fading into obscurity. ""Data Crumb Relics"" transforms these ephemeral digital traces into tangible artifacts of cultural and emotional significance.

This project views artificial intelligence as both a tool and a historical lens representing a crucial slice of human intelligence history. AI serves as our archaeological partner, meticulously analyzing, reconstructing, and reinterpreting lost digital fragments. As we train machine learning models to identify and regenerate these digital remnants, we create a dialogue between past and present technological understanding, documenting the evolution of how machines interpret human expression.

By repurposing obsolete data rather than allowing it to vanish into digital oblivion, we align with sustainable digital practices while preserving AI's developmental timeline. Each artifact becomes a dual record, capturing both human digital expression and the AI methods used to recover it.
Visitors experience these relics through immersive installations that blend digital fabrication with tangible materials: resin-encased code fragments, projection-mapped memories, and interactive displays. These sensory encounters evoke emotional connections while documenting the progression of AI capabilities over time.

""Data Crumb Relics"" invites viewers to reconsider what we value in our digital lives, finding beauty in what was once considered disposable while chronicling AI’s ongoing role in human history, preserving both our digital past and the evolving relationship between human and machine intelligence."