Harvard’s ability to foster innovation has long been a core strength of the university, never more so than today. President Faust’s mission to create One Harvard is spurring greater collaboration across schools, disciplines and facilities, and the GSD is at the forefront of the explosion of creativity.
The Harvard i-lab, with the GSD and 9 other schools participating, hosted the first Deans’ Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge this spring, and the GSD was represented in 4 of the 7 finalist teams. The winner was an app called Musey developed by Judy Fulton (MArch ’13), Hokan Wong (MArch), Wes Thomas (MArch) and Helen Marriage (LF ‘13).
Some of the most exciting collaborative initiatives have ties to the folks at metaLAB. The Labrary, started by a creative team with Jeffrey Schnapp (metaLAB co-founder and faculty director, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and visiting professor in architecture), Jessica Yurkofsky (MUP ’12) and Loeb librarian Anne Whiteside, grew out of Schnapp’s Library Test Kitchen.
Jesse Shapins (PhD ’13, James Burns (past instructor in architecture) and Kara Oehler, all metaLAB co-founders – with the help of an impressive award from the Knight News Challenge – launched the digital storytelling platform Zeega, one of the first start-ups invited to join Matter, a new media accelerator in San Francisco. The team previously worked together on Mapping Main Street, a collaborative documentary media project.
Marrikka Trotter (3rd year PhD student) transformed an intensive history and theory of architecture course for incoming graduate students into an online course, with mentoring from Kevin Lau (head of instructional technology group and library) and Michael Hays (professor of architectural theory and associate dean). Her project was shaped in the Harvard Institute for Learning and Technology’s January Academy on Technology-Enabled Teaching and Learning.
Read more in “One Harvard.”
Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer