Independent Thesis in Satisfaction of the Degree MAUD, MLAUD, or MUP

Following participation in the department’s fall thesis preparation seminar (GSD 9204), the spring term of the second year sees students complete, defend, and submit their thesis. Thesis students must register in GSD 9302: Independent Thesis, which counts for eight units. This is a critical period in the thesis process and one where a strong student-advisor relationship is essential. During the term, students work closely with their advisors to develop a final thesis that can pass the scrutiny of faculty and outside critics. Students present their thesis-in-progress in mid-term and pre-final reviews and defend the final project in a final review.

 

Independent Thesis in Satisfaction of Degree MArch

The Thesis Program encourages students to take advantage of the wide range of resources and research initiatives of the Graduate School of Design and its faculty to make a thoughtful contribution to the discipline. Thesis is a required component of the March I program, and an optional track for the March II program.

Each student works on a final thesis project based upon the interests and research done in the semesters leading up to the final term and under the guidance of a designated faculty advisor, with whom s/he will meet regularly throughout the course of the term.

The final thesis project, having attained a sufficient standard of completion, will be presented and defended at a final, open review consisting of a panel chaired by the thesis advisor and composed of members of the faculty and invited critics.

Automation in Practice: Building the future of Architecture(s), Engineering, and Construction

Population is estimated to exceed 10 billion people by the year 2050 requiring an immediate doubling of productivity in the AEC industry which includes Architecture (in all forms), Engineering, and Construction. At the same time, global resource scarcity is projected to limit access to basic resources with over half that population in areas where water is scarce. An already dire shortage of skilled labor has been exacerbated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the perceived great resignation. Automation in AEC has the potential to address similar opportunities and challenges that automated manufacturing processes have helped to resolve in other industries resulting in decreased production time, greater material efficiencies, higher labor productivity, better worker health and safety, compensation for labor shortages, reduced environmental impact, and enhanced design opportunity, Put simply, automation has the potential to enable the AEC industry to safely meet the global building and infrastructural needs of an increasing population. Many exciting technological developments and industry trends signal that the time is ripe for automation to take hold as we proceed into the future of AEC.

Within this context, the Automation in Practice will explore automation across the AEC industry and includes thematic areas relating to design automation and design for automation; Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) strategies; automated heavy machinery and equipment; off and on-site automation and robotics; and aspects of automation applied to building and landscape design, building and infrastructure production, and off and onsite construction. Beyond the geometric exuberance that often characterizes conversations about computational design and digital fabrication, Automation in Practice, will address the ways in which automation technologies are impacting the way the world builds and will support the future human needs through the built environment.  Students will gain contextual understand of why, how, and ways to engage in the automated future of AEC. Throughout the semester, special consideration will be given to the geographic, economic, cultural, and political forces that are enabling the introduction of automated tooling globally in all levels of access to resources, and to those that stand in the way.

Given the breadth of subject matter and opportunities in all aspects of design-to-construction processes for buildings, landscapes, infrastructure, etc. students from all disciplines are invited to participate and course assignments can be tailored to related to all disciplines and research interests within the programs at the GSD.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Survey of Energy Technology (at SEAS)

Principles governing energy generation and interconversion. Current and projected world energy use. Selected important current and anticipated future technologies for energy generation, interconversion, storage, and end usage.

Recommended Prep: Calculus of a single variable, one semester of college-level physics, and familiarity with chemistry at the high school advanced placement level.

This SEAS course will be held in person from the start of the term.

Acoustic Space: A Media Archaeology of Building Types

This is a seminar on the past and present relationship between architecture, information technologies, and mass media. More than ever before, we live in acoustic space. We live constantly plugged-in, travelling in our personal sonic bubbles bounded by headphones and other devices. We listen because we like it, but also to disconnect and avoid other noises. Our times are defined by an unprecedented and simultaneous coexistence of sounds and images disseminated at the speed of light, and yet there is little understanding of the architectural implications of this phenomenon. However, the construction of the media-saturated environments we inhabit began more than 100 years ago, when radio started to populate the ether, when television entered the domestic space, until the present day, when the internet seems to cover every single aspect of our daily lives. This seemingly invisible and immaterial phenomenon has been producing—and has been produced by—new building types throughout the past century, which have been widely overlooked by our discipline.
 
If media technologies such as radio, telephony, television, and the internet presume the construction of “space” without any material implications, this seminar proposes to look closely at select case studies that evidence the consequences of media in built space. We will focus on the intersection of buildings and electronic media technologies, with specific interest in sonicity, aiming to understand the material questions these media-populated spaces raise for architects. In this context, the seminar will trace the genealogy of Broadcasting Houses, Television Studios, Cinemas, Acoustic Laboratories, Telephone Exchange Buildings, Educational Spaces, and Data Centers, among others.
 
The seminar is a multidisciplinary course intersecting the history and theory of architecture with media history and theory. It is dedicated to architecture students and to other students enrolled in programs and intellectual disciplines with interests in media and/or sound studies. The seminar will be structured along thematic readings each week. In addition to reading discussions from diverse fields and disciplines, each student will lead a 30-minute discussion based on the presentation of a built case study.

Assignments
Participants in the seminar are expected to work throughout the semester on one case study of their choice selected in conversation with the instructor. Students will work on an illustrated paper in which drawings and writing will have equal relevance. In addition, participants in the seminar will submit a 1-minute-long sound or video composition made of found footage or sounds related to their case study.

Grading Rubric
30% Class Presentation / 40% In-class Participation / 30% Final Presentation
 

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

Discourse and Advocacy in the Spaces of Curation

Curation, the intentional act of selection and display of content, is often categorized in one of two ways: as an institutionalized type exemplified by the rarified systems and cultures of museums, and as a more subjective, populist curation that appears in highly edited social media content creation. This course will focus on a field of architectural curation that mines the gap between these two poles in order to prompt discourse, advocacy, and activism through informal and tactical exhibitions, displays, messaging, events, and public dissemination.

At once grittier than the museum and more calculated than personal feeds, this field of architectural curation places participants in approachable spaces to interact with one another face-to-face in the presence of objects, artifacts, images, information, and ideas. Most often associated with smaller and more experimental spaces and practices, locations of this type of curation can take many forms, from gallery walls to urban streets, from public landscapes to building surfaces.

The course will investigate these aspects of architectural curation through guest speakers drawn from organizations and practices worldwide. They will share case studies on exhibits, events, oral histories, films, demonstrations, publications, installations, and other curated outputs. Student-led presentations and reading discussions will explore a broad range of related topics: curation as setting (formats, form, site); curation as content (research, writing, criticism, narrative, messaging); and curation as impact (relevance, advocacy, engagement, audience, visibility, reception).

Workshop sessions—led by curator and exhibition designer Chris Grimley of pinkcomma gallery—will develop skills through the examination of modes of curation, including an understanding of archival resources, experiential graphics, representational tools, and new media models. Throughout the semester, students will work in small teams to assess precedents, develop an exhibition proposal, and produce components of a collective exhibition for public display.

 

Up to eight seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to Narratives Domain and ADPD Area students.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

Introduction to Machine Learning for Designers

This course will provide an introduction to the rapidly advancing area of research in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Designers will come away with a computational toolkit enabling them to leverage AI in their projects and focus areas.

The course will cover the subfields of unsupervised machine learning for generative design, providing state of the art techniques for visual representation and exploration, reinforcement learning for modelling behavior design, and multi-agent learning for modelling interaction between agents. For designers, the advances in these techniques pose rich application areas ranging from image processing to urban design.

Access to these techniques has been democratized through easy to use, high level Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), providing designers and artists who may not have an extensive computational background with new tools to enhance and reimagine their work. Students will learn the basics of neural networks and deep learning. We will cover foundational ideas as well as core skills in ML frameworks such as Keras, Tensorflow, Pytorch etc. Students will complete the course with a hands-on design project.

As students gain expertise in developing AI models, they will also learn to weave in critical perspectives through which to interrogate core issues such as bias in AI models and its implications in the near future. Prerequisite is basic coding. No prior knowledge of machine learning is assumed. Python experience welcome but not required.

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Data Science for Building Performance Simulation and Architectural Design Optimization (Module 2)

The modeling of energy-efficient buildings and sustainable urban development is an increasing concern in both the building design and sustainability consulting industries. Early adoption of building performance simulation software for decision-making during the design phase is essential to achieving sustainable design goals. Guiding designers to pursue sustainability in their built environments will bring favorable outcomes and low-cost adaptations. Machine learning (ML) and data science are promising approaches to shaping the design process and offer instantaneous performance feedback. The active use of data science techniques increases the efficiency and accuracy of building simulation workflow and the optimization of building geometry.

This class will leverage data science and performance simulation as the primary drivers in determining design decisions. In the last decade, the fundamentals of building performance simulation tools for energy, daylighting, airflow, and renewable energies have been translated into performance simulation tools and metrics with relevant measures. There are great advantages for students learning to use such tools, including the ability to calculate metrics and to apply related methodologies in their building designs. However, such utilization requires a high level of understanding of the computations necessary for the geometric modeling process, as well as relevant programming skills. These programming skills and analysis techniques will be explained in this class with practical hands-on workshops to impart environmental information and predict building performance in response to design changes. This course will also introduce data management skills, ML-based surrogate modeling, data analysis and visualization for advanced research. The final deliverables will be an optimized building design option utilizing data science techniques on the design decision making process.

Objectives
• Understanding the data science techniques for building performance simulation
• Learning how to efficiently use ML tools to assist in design decision-making
• Application of performance simulation data analysis techniques to make informed design decisions
• Developing adequate knowledge/programming skills to facilitate in-depth discussion about performance-driven design using data-driven methods

Prerequisites
Students are encouraged to consider the course’s time limitations and prepare in advance. This will ensure access to the full benefits of this course. Reviewing a Python tutorial and obtaining a general understanding of its basic operations is highly recommended for those unfamiliar with Python. However, students without prior experience in Python or other programming languages will still be able to follow along and participate in these introductory workshops.

Up to six seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to EE Area students.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

LIT: A Survey and Design Research Seminar of Light and Lighting (Module 1)

What makes for a good luminous environment? What distinguishes a good luminous environment from a bad one?  This course surveys the many shades of light and luminous environments through history, effects, metrics, tools, technologies, and logics, with the goal of understanding how to craft environments that equitably support people’s biological and psychological needs, bring us joy, and minimize harm to other humans and non-humans.

Open to anyone interested in light, students will choose to either experiment with a lighting design project or a research project.  To pursue the design project, recommended prior enrollment in 6122 Environmental Systems (or similar course). You are encouraged to continue your projects into Module 2 “Data Science for Building Performance Simulation and Architectural Design Optimization”. Students interested in industrial ecologies may select to pursue design research into the manufacture of lighting hardware which will support the forthcoming revised IES ‘Lighting Practice’ document “Sustainable Lighting – An Introduction to the Environmental Impacts of Lighting”.

Each session will include lively discussion, interactive lecture, and workshop practicum. There may be a field trip to a local manufacturer and/or an evening walking tour in Cambridge or Boston TBD based on scheduling and COVID realities.

Assessment will be based on engagement in class, occasional quizzes, efforts, and work product.

Understanding Goals
By the end of this module, you will understand….

Up to six seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to EE Area students.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Investigating Normal: Assistive and Adaptive Design for Interdependent Futures

Part seminar in disability studies and part design laboratory, this course introduces students to design by, with, and for people with atypical bodies and minds. We'll read deeply in the history of disability rights, the construction of normalcy, and theories of personhood and human worth that span the domains of philosophy, anthropology, feminist criticism, and more. And we'll examine the long inventive tradition of making and remaking the built world enacted by disabled people in design at all scales: curb cuts, telecommunications, closed captioning, kitchen tools, and beyond. Students will produce small experimental proposals in designing pragmatic forms of access and in interrogative cultural projects—for solving problems, when called for, and for asking larger investigative questions. Fabrication opportunities will include: modest product-scale independent experiments, plus one larger team-based project with external collaborators resulting in a proposal, scale model, or design-build bespoke objects, as relevant.

 

Up to eight seats will be held for MDes students.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.