MDes Open Project: Perception as Agency

This Open Project investigates how emergent technologies manipulate perception and explores their capacity to influence societal and environmental systems. The class challenges students to rethink perception not as passive observation but as an active, malleable process that can shape behavior, culture, and ecological relationships.

Leveraging emergent technologies that blur the lines between real and synthetic, students will interrogate how “hacked” perceptions can reveal unseen societal dynamics and drive positive change.

Through context-specific projects, they will probe questions such as:
• How do synthetic realities shape collective action on environmental issues?
• What role can the altering of perception play in promoting inclusivity or equity in urban environments?
• How can immersive technologies foster deeper ecological awareness?

Outcomes will be in the form of immersive installations, AI-driven responsive systems, environmental simulations, or critical interventions addressing perceptual frameworks. Students will work collaboratively to create hybrid media explorations that reframe the intersection of humans, their environments, and their evolving senses of reality.

MDes Open Project: Metabolic Rift, Shift, & Gift

To capture a range of design research interests, topics, and methods, this Open Project will begin by collectively identifying a set of salient modern metabolic rifts that emerge through design, the legacies of which continue to shape the vertiginous social and environmental inequities of contemporary life. The term “metabolic rift” refers to material and energetic disruptions into human-environment relations. As such, this Open Project work will include material, energetic, historical, ecological, geographic, and political explication of the selected metabolic rifts and their associated metabolic shifts imposed through the take/make/fake/break paradigm of modern design. This explication will include agnotological consideration of what modern design has externalized, ignored, and suppressed in its pedagogies and practices. The future can no longer be a colony of present externalizations and agnotologies. Accordingly, the final stage of analysis and projection in this Open Project will be a focus on metabolic gifts: the regenerative exuberance and reciprocal abundance of terrestrial ecologies that are vital features of both premodern as well as prospects for nonmodern life ahead.

While the eco-metabolic orientation of this Open Project suits students in Ecologies and Mediums, students in Publics and Narratives will enliven the social/political/historical/discursive dimensions of the Open Project. Participants in this Open Project will co-develop responses to the metabolic rift, shift, and gift framework through readings, discussion, research protocols, and public presentation. The course will proceed in three stages: 1. Cognition in the Wild & Media As Method will establish key working concepts and methods (1 week); 2. Metabolic Rift/Shift/Gift will focus on the theoretical and practical framework, while also collectively identifying research foci and content in small teams (5 weeks); 3. Public Projection will refine the design research content and identify the means, formats, and audiences for Open Project outcomes in the remaining weeks. Through a series of structure Protocols, individual student research and production will contribute depth to the collective output of one of four teams, with each team focused on a salient metabolic rift. Each team will develop and design a range of media and artifacts to explicate the Metabolic Rift/Shift/Gift, to be presented in a public domain.

The aim of this Open Project is an inversion of the inequities, iniquities, and injustices that emerge through the abstractions and externalizations celebrated in design pedagogy and practice. The provided framework and methods will help develop design research and outcomes that augment/amplify terrestrial ecology and relations through design, rather than extract and exploit them. In the decades ahead, the obligations and opportunities of a more literal description of what design is, does, and could be suggest a strident departure from the unequal exchanges, environmental load displacements, and underdevelopment paradigms of contemporary design tropes.

MDes Open Project: Forms of Assembly: All Things Considered

“When bodies congregate, move, and speak together, they lay claim to a certain space as public space.” — Judith Butler.

In the public space, we pass by, come together, or not, and continuously inform and form one another. It is a space of appearance, disagreement, liberation, and encounter critical for participatory democracy, freedom, and a just society.

Climate change, global migration, war, threats associated with artificial intelligence, dwindling democracies, and heightened polarization are among the most formidable challenges of our time. These conditions give rise to policies, practices, and spaces of isolation, exclusion, and violence that impact our daily lives everywhere, urging us to envision and enact the formation of a wider assembly.

In “We Have Never Been Modern”, Bruno Latour expands the notion of the assembly beyond the human into a “Parliament of Things” that includes the invisible, unthinkable, unrepresentable nonhuman, objects and semi-objects. He calls for a new constitution that considers all things and their properties, relations, abilities, and groupings. This newly imagined formation of an open ended and ever-expanding assembly of reciprocity and care is not only just, but critical for earthly survival in the time of the Anthropocene.

At the intersection of art, design, activism, theory, and practice, this GSD Open Project seeks to experiment in forms and spaces of assembly and care, imagining otherwise (Lola Olufemi) how all bodies matter and all things are considered as an ever-expanding, entangled collective. It focuses on the articulation of spatial equity and considering the expansion of rights to more than humans, subjects, and things. Design is used here as an agent and agency to activate the potentiality of underused and interstitial public spaces and use various interventions to activate the space of appearance and empower the public(s) imagination.

Students can use a variety of art and design mediums and formats to research, engage with publics, tell stories, and develop strategies throughout the semester. Projects may include performances, exhibitions, large-scale installations, films, publications, symposiums, websites, the creation of critical architectural elements and narratives, or policy recommendations.

The Open Project includes a lecture series, in-class workshops and independent works, where students are asked to identify and define their agency as designers and members of an assembly, where all things are considered. At the end of the semester, we will assemble the projects in a group exhibition and publication.

Discourse and Research Methods

This pro-seminar is a core requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic areas that range across various topics and the methods and skills that might be involved in each area. Generally, these will include: historical thinking, critical thinking, thinking about technologies, analysis of social settings, theorizing landscapes, and theorizing aspects of urban form, as well as analyzing its environmental performance. Each seminar will be of two or more hours in duration and comprised of presentation by an invited faculty member on a theme of their research and scholarly interest, followed by discussion among the class. The seminar will meet on Thursdays between 3:00pm and 5:45pm at 20 Sumner Road, House Zero’s lower floor conference room.

Discourse and Methods I

This course is open only to Ph.D. students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design (Ph.D. students from other departments may participate with instructor’s permission). This year’s course focuses on major theoretical and historiographical issues and themes that still structure scholarly discourse today. Students will confront these issues and themes by relating them to key methodological concerns and horizons in their own emerging research agendas.
 

Thesis Extension in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design

Thesis extension in satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.

Thesis in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design

Thesis in Satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.

Independent Study by Candidates for Doctoral Degrees

9502 must be taken for either 2 or 4 units. 

Under faculty guidance, the student conducts an independent reading program and formulates a thesis proposal. The course is intended for doctoral students. 

In addition to enrolling in the course, students must download and fill out the independent study petition, which can be found on my.Harvard. Enrollment will not be final until the petition is submitted. 

Independent Design Engineering Project II

The Independent Design Engineering Project (IDEP) is a two-semester project during which students in the Master in Design Engineering (MDE) program work on understanding a concise, real-world problem, and develop a prototypical solution. Methodologically a continuation of the MDE first-year studio, each student frames a complex problem and engages with stakeholders in order to understand its multi-scalar, multi-disciplinary aspects. Work on a solution involves a combination of analytical and visualization skills, technical skills, and design methods, culminating in the development, prototyping and evaluation of a solution.

The two-semester long IDEP is the required second-year component of the MDE program. In the fall, students primarily focus on framing and understanding the problem by conducting  research,  engaging stakeholders and prototyping early solutions. During the spring, students work independently, meeting with their two advisors at mutually agreeable intervals, with the goal of developing a final prototype and evaluating its impact. Student presentations at the midterm and the final reviews are required. The IDEP directors will hold optional weekly office hours for which any second year MDE student or IDEP team can sign up. 

Independent Thesis in Satisfaction of the Degree Master in Landscape Architecture

Following preparation in GSD 9341, each student pursues a topic of relevance to landscape architecture, which must include academic inquiry and design exploration.