Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices

The Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices Seminar investigates art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of contemporary culture and the city. As artists and designers respond to challenges of global magnitude and local impact, engage with cross-cultural and often conflicting conditions, and operate in disparate economic and societal realms, the need for increased engagement and collaboration is paramount. The complexity present in the context of action—economic, social, political, cultural, and ecological— frequently requires interdisciplinary approaches accompanied by cross-pollinating knowledge and skill sets.
Socially engaged art, relational aesthetics, and activist and emancipatory design practices challenge disciplinary boundaries not only in the art and the design worlds but also as they cross over and interact with communities, policy makers, and experts in fields such as social and political science, anthropology, economics, and ecology; this leads to the expansion of professional vocabularies, tools, and imaginaries and also cultivates new forms of interdisciplinary knowledge. As art and design practices move from art in public space to art in public interest (Miwon Kwon), their participatory and relational makeup can generate platforms and agencies that question dominant culture, construct new practices, establish new subjectivities, and subvert existing configurations of power (Chantal Mouffe). Historical examples of such approaches include Dada, the Situationists, and other avant-garde movements as well as contemporary art and design practices such as the Silent University, Philadelphia Assembled, and the O.N.E. mile project and Afrofuturism movement in Detroit. Such disseminated practices challenge the boundaries of art and design and their environments.

The seminar will navigate the evolving interdisciplinarity of art and design practices by engaging with the city, its communities, and the art world and by addressing urgent societal concerns.
Practice oriented, the seminar includes a series of workshops dedicated to exploring artistic tools and methods as well as the context in which they perform.

Fundamental goals of the seminar are:

The seminar will include three workshops that investigate the agency of art and design in activating, participating, and responding to public spaces in the city and the communities they inhabit, as follows: 1) 'Boston in Context and Community Engagement' with the Harvard School of Public Health; 2) 'Safe Spaces and Sanctuaries' with the Rotterdam-based artist and community mobilizer Jeanne van Heeswijk; 3) 'The Museum and the City: Reimagining Inclusive and Decentralized Institutions' with the New Museum in New York.

The three workshops will offer complementary and integrated perspectives to help interact and engage with our environment—the city, the community, the artist/designer, and the institute—while bringing societal urgencies such as socioeconomic disparities, race and gender inequality, and climate justice to the foreground. Priority enrollment to ADPD MDes students.

Priority enrollment is given to MDes ADPD students. A limited number of additional seats are available via the limited enrollment course lottery.

AI and Computer Simulation in Landscape Practice

The course aims to imagine and critically investigate the role of AI and computer simulation in landscape practice, considering the perceptual, intangible and context-sensitive aspects that transform a space into a landscape. A critical review providing the introductory knowledge related to the fields of complexity science, complexity theory of cities, and landscape design will guide the process.

Over the past decades, design practices related to globalization shaped an emergent international style for public places, a “new generic landscape” (Jakob, 2017) characterized by highly repetitive patterns. At the same time, innovation in the field of computer science introduced the automation of behavioral analysis, and the simulation of human actions in space through AI, a technology that could be potentially integrated into the most common design and representation tools, such as BIM.

The coeval existence of such technologies and the new “generic” style suggest a dystopian future in which these instances will reinforce each other mutually, fostering the birth of increasingly homogeneous forms. This condition could lead to a potential loss of the diverse and sometimes very particular quality of designed landscapes that take advantage of local specificities. Many questions arise from these considerations, such as: Which will be the designer’s role in the future? How could such technology support the design of culturally relevant landscapes? What is the real function of these tools in the world of contemporary design?

The course will be held in the form of a limited-enrollment seminar, including lectures and class discussions. Students are expected to read the course materials in advance to take part in the debate. Critical opinions, doubts, and ideas are most welcome. The course is open to all the GSD community, and there are no specific prerequisites.

The evaluation will consider active class participation as well as the quality of the delivered materials, two 1000 words essays and a final 3000 words essay, elaborating personal thoughts on the class topic. Based on each student’s individual creative attitude, both pieces could include visuals, videos, prototypes or any other media aiming to support the argument.

Responsive Environments: Episodes in Experiential Futures

This course introduces to the students the tools and necessary thinking framework to create technologically driven speculative environments in the near future of the built environment. The course takes a critical approach on technological augmentation that is valid spatially, socially and psychologically. By putting the human experience at the center and forefront, from the immediate body scale to the larger environment encompassing buildings and the urban spaces, the course examines new and emerging models, technologies, and techniques for the design of innovative architectural human interfaces and responsive environments.
Taking a holistic view, the class will address multifaceted aspects of our experience of the built environment and how the rapid pace of technological innovation affects our relationship to our daily lives and spaces around us. The course takes advantage of the resources offered by the ongoing research project at the REAL lab with the Italian City of Bergamo, the course aims to build on that research and open up new research and speculative design opportunities. Bergamo – a typical mid-size European city – offers an ideal case study for prototypical interventions that can be possibly replicated in other contexts.
The first part of the course leading to the final project will consist of readings and discussions, background research, site analysis, and emerging technology investigation. Hands-on prototyping will be part of the course requirement and will feed into the larger speculative concepts. The course places an important emphasis on what makes the design of these responsive environments perceptually valid and technically feasible. Topics of in-class discussions include: techniques of digital/physical perceptual correlations, body-centric interaction, user experience design, and technological viability and perceptual longevity. The final group project will be a speculative design intervention, supported by a research paper and prototypes, envisaging potential scenarios ? or episodes of experiential futures.
The course outcomes will be a contribution to a publication. Students from any background and concentration are encouraged to apply to the lottery. No specific prerequisites are needed.

This course will include a trip to Bergamo, Italy for 12 students from February 23rd to March 2nd. Students who travel in this course will be term billed $300. Students can only participate in one traveling course or studio. One set itinerary is made and students are responsible for contacting the travel agent and paying for any changes to this itinerary. Students are also responsible for the cost of all meals and incidentals, such as local travel. Additional limited space in the course will be available for students not participating in the trip. Students from any background and concentration are encouraged to apply to the lottery. No specific prerequisites are needed.

Digital Media: Writing Form

This course offers an introduction to the field of design and computation through the primal pursuit of writing form.

Setting aside the better-known paradigms of sketching, drafting, 3D modelling, scripting or even coding, writing (in this context) refers to the level of design agency afforded by the essential application of parametric formulations to design thinking. By the same token, our titular appeal to the notion of form is neither aesthetic nor ideological. Unlike shape (with which it is often confused), we understand form as a syntactic, procedural, and – increasingly– technical proposition, with its fair share of architectural disciplinary autonomy.

Hence this is not a technology offering. Rather, it is a course for architectural designers wishing to work out of –and then expand– the canon of architectural typology, by taking on the new, sneaky, ‘invisible’ types.

This crash course in indexical modelling (the deployment of variable analytic surfaces to parametrically define the space, boundaries, structure, and tectonic texture of a given three-dimensional construct) will be organised around semi-monthly lectures and applied workshops in parametric design, leading to the development of a number of intermediate design sketches, and a final design proposal. The outcome in all cases will be numerically fabricated physical models –laser-cut or 3D printed—with supporting diagrams.

On the theoretical side, the course will clarify the tenets of parametricism both practically (mathematically), formally, and theoretically with an assigned reading list stretching from Rosalind Krauss to George L. Legendre, and Greg Lynn.

On the practical side, generative design tools will include PTC MathCAD 15, Rhino 6 /Grasshopper, and the proprietary, third-party Grasshopper plugins Surf_TM, Millipede, and Weaverbird. No experience is necessary, as participants will be issued powerful software templates to work from every week.

Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:30 AM – 1 PM, every other week. An optional support class will be held on Mondays from 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM. The instructor will provide written progress feedback on a weekly basis.

Digital Media: Ambiance

How do we define the “ambiance” of a place? What causes specific environments to evoke different feelings? Are there consistent elements that define these ambiances, and is it possible to capture the qualities and characteristics?

This class will explore these questions by observing, quantifying, and attempting to measure different aspects of site-specific environments at Harvard. Students will explore and define different measurable and quantifiable strategies of capturing the unseen elements that define the feel of these different spaces.

Class discussions and projects will utilize the tension created by our natural inclination to detect and react to different ambiances, even though the environment’s characteristics may be difficult to deconstruct, analyze, and pinpoint. The class will look at current and historical examples and theories of psycho-geographical effects that can be tested, revealed, or measured with new technologies, and will work to quantify the different elements that contribute to the ambiance of these spaces. The class will learn the various ways of measuring and understanding these qualities through spatial sensing, mapping, creating and prototyping.

The final project will involve the creation of site-specific installations, either individually or in groups that reveal, augment, or represent the specific elements.

Class workshops will cover the following tools and skills based on project and individual group needs: Arduino (including input, output, making motions, and using devices to connect to the web), basic electronics, Ohm’s Law, potentiometers, capacitor charging, using a multimeter, Shopbot, scanning, printing, 3D toolpaths, using an oscilloscope, solder, making simple boards, sending data to a computer for processing and display, wireless devices, Rx/Tx chip, Bluetooth.

 

Landscape Representation II

Building on the foundations of Landscape Representation I, this course investigates further the generative potential of representation as part of a productive feedback loop in the design process.

The course will provide a space to think critically about the representation of design, the role that representation plays in the process of designing, and the skills needed to create those representations. Experimenting with new modes of documentation and framing, we will work collaboratively to explore the reflexive relationship between conceptualization and visualization.

Providing a platform to engage studio work in new ways, students will translate and reinterpret drawings and models through a variety of conventional and unconventional media. The course will cover a range of techniques, skills, and workflows that embrace both analog and digital methodologies, exploring representation as a process of thinking, making and designing.

Patterned Justice: Design Languages for a Just Pittsburgh

Christopher Alexander’s seminal 1977 book “A Pattern Language” describes that people designing their environments rely on certain "languages” that allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a legible and coherent system. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to urban planning and design problems including, “How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to the public realm?” or “What are the ways of designing mixed-use spaces for the informal economy of disinvested communities”?

The Just City Lab at Harvard GSD has created “The Just City Index”, a framework of 50 values, for communities to assess current conditions of justice or injustice, and then identify and define the necessary values to make cities or neighborhoods more just.  The conditions of injustice and justice are different for different people, communities and cities around the world, and therefore each should be able to construct the values most critical to their vision for justice.

As cities become more diverse, yet remain racially and economically segregated, there must be a cross-disciplinary conversation about the just distribution of goods, services, powers, and rights. We must ask who participates in designing our cities; how to achieve acceptance of different cultural normatives and a common ground for future city development.  Urban planning and design processes therefore need a value-based manifesto and agglomeration of tactics and arrangements that help to advance urban justice by involving a variety of city-builders and disciplinary expertise. In Pittsburgh, organizations like The Heinz Endowments work to balance the demands for advancing economic growth and environmental resiliency and the equally pressing demand for reconciling long-standing wounds of racial segregation. Planning strategies are needed to address issues including but not limited to 1) inclusion and belonging in the public realm; 2) anti-displacement in the wake of new investment and value creation; 3) new models of vacant land reclamation and the reuse of industrial sites and neighborhoods decimated by urban renewal; 4) protections and conservation of natural resources against the effects of climate change and 5) the participation of marginalized communities in process of city making.

This will be a multi-disciplinary option studio that will interrogate and advance socio-spatial justice through design and planning “pattern-making” in Pittsburgh, PA. The studio will be conducted through a process of co-creation and the results will be published as a part of handbook that can help advance the work of local organizations in Pittsburgh.  The studio will run in parallel with the Veldacademie in Rotterdam, Netherlands, a collaborator of the Just City Lab since 2017.

A sample of studio outcomes include:

Create a collection of 50 spatial design and policy patterns to act as a tool-kit for urban design processes linked to the Just City Index values.
Conduct a workshop with invited members of the Pittsburgh community to facilitate a co-creation process, the results of which will form the basis of creating the patterns.
The studio, open to all disciplines, will feature guest critics throughout the studio.

This studio has an irregular schedule. The official days of instruction are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, from 2-6pm. Dates when the instructor will be in residence: January 25, January 29-30, February 6, 12, 19-20 and 26, March 5-6, 12-13, 26-27, April 9-10, 16-17, 23-24. Two doctoral TAs and guest critics from Pittsburgh will be available during the 4 class sessions the instructor is not present, and the instructor will be available at additional times outside of these dates.

Future of Streets in Los Angeles

The Future of Streets studio in Los Angeles will investigate the impact of new mobility technologies on the built environment of LA, seeking solutions that maximize multi-modal, socially inclusive, and environmentally sustainable outcomes for the city. The studio will focus on sites surrounding the Expo Line, leading from downtown LA to downtown Santa Monica and explore how the experience of urban travel is likely to change with the advent of automated, shared and electric vehicles, personal mobility devices and automated package delivery systems.

The studio will examine current modal choices in different built and socio-economic environments around the Expo line and explore how the introduction of new mobility options is likely to disrupt spatial accessibility, existing trip patterns, as well as the functions of streets and public spaces. By focusing on half a dozen neighborhoods adjacent to the new Metro line, the studio will also explore how new mobility technologies could complement, rather than compete with walking and public transit and explore the impact of new mobility options in varying built environments and socio-economic settings.

Sites include the USC area, which will serve as the epicenter of LA’s 2028 Olympics, as well as transit catchment areas around Pico, Vermont, Crenshaw, La Cienega, Sepulveda and Palms. City of LA’s planning, urban design and transportation departments are collaborating with the studio as public sector hosts and the Renault/Nissan/Mitsubishi Alliance and Ford are sponsoring the studio. The studio is open to participants with prior urban planning, urban design and urban mobility project experiences and involves a site visit in February 2019.

Designing Atmospheres and Technologies for Social Interaction

The knowledge economy has become the main engine of economic prosperity in urban areas. High-tech talent and industry have moved back to many cities, raising their economic output, but the revival of urban centers has caused unprecedented inequality. Urban environments affect social behavior, the way we live and socialize, impacting our physical and psychological conditions, conditioning our present and future development as individuals and as a society. Public space is an emerging issue in our contemporary societies and it is one of the key indicators of urban quality, being responsible for the majority of social interactions.

Communities have been gathering in physical spaces since the very beginning of human existence. With the arrival of the digital era, new kinds of communities have appeared which, driven by common interests and goals, found public places in forums, blogs, social networks, and other virtual spaces. Today Internet is the "public space" where the most successful models of collective creation and self-organization are taking place.

We cannot address the design and transformation of cities without considering the potential of digital technologies and understanding how they can enhance urban complexity, creating more inclusive and yet more connected environments. Technology is not only a matter of problem-solving. It brings new possibilities that usually change the way we behave, enabling us to better relate and interact with each other and with the surroundings, lowering the barriers for citizen engagement. Digital-physical interaction environments are becoming more complementary and connected, combining each other’s features in a growingly powerful way.

CASE STUDY: Boston’s status as a cultural and economic magnet has made it a “Class-Divided” city which suffers one of the worst income inequalities in major US cities. It is clear how much difference neighborhoods make in terms of life outcomes within the same city. The studio will look at new opportunities in the Greater Boston area for the creation of hybrid physical-digital urban atmospheres that can enhance social interaction as a strategy to increase the complexity of its urban ecosystems, balancing and improving the living conditions of communities, and serve as a tool for social inclusion and empowerment.

FRAMEWORK + OUTCOMES + TOOLS: The studio challenges participants to develop initiatives that reconcile existing physical conditions with the emerging needs of citizens and promotes active participation in the redefinition of the contemporary city. The teaching framework leads to a myriad of outputs, with each project representing a singular response that reflects students’ interests, aspirations and societal needs. From creating a digital interface to enable community resource sharing to building an interactive device as a catalyst for the activation of a square. Even ordinary life processes can provide an incredibly rich and fertile field for experimentation, while at the same time offering the potential to make a genuine difference in society. In addition, a strong emphasis on communication will be made, as students will be asked to synthesize their ideas and proposals beyond the use of the conventional tools, being encouraged to incorporate other media. They will also be encouraged to present at the final review a display or experience connected to the essence of their projects.

NOTE: This option studio runs in parallel with the seminar Making Participation Relevant to Design, sharing information and having some shared sessions on Fridays.

This studio has an irregular schedule. The official days of instruction are Tuesdays and Fridays, from 2-6pm. Dates when the instructor will be in residence: January 24-25, February 5-8, 19-22; March 5-8, 26-29; April 9-12; 23-30. The instructor will be available on additional times outside of these dates to make up for missed sessions.

Large Scale Projects to Create New Centralities in Shanghai. Potentials for the Regular City

The studio focuses on a study of capacity of big urbanistic projects to direct the growth and transformation of large metropolises. It takes the example of Shanghai and its Expo 2010 to investigate their potential for creating one or several centralities in this diverse, dynamic city.

This project forms part of research into the regular city and urban grid patterns, focusing here on “large scale projects” in the form of big events, with the aim of understanding to what extent these major projects represent urban design operations that have to be considered in several design cycles. The original design responds to an initial challenge such as the World Expo, but it then requires a different approach that takes into account the construction of the real city. Here we will consider the potential of the second project, or second cycle, of the initial big project.

Shanghai is a city that has become a global metropolis in just 50 years, with an exponential population growth from two to twenty million. This dynamic has materialised with major expansions to the west and south, particularly worthy of mention recently are the nine new towns that direct growth dynamics in the various geographic directions.

The major Expo 2010 project, quite close to the Bund and to Pudong, occupying over 500 hectares of land and resting on both banks of the Huangpu River, will probably serve to rethink the development of a large central place for the metropolis as a whole. Designing multiple centralities seems a positive strategy to balance gigantic global metropolises.

The strategic selection of the site was probably the central decision in the Expo project, which also materialised with a very generic definition of street layout for traffic, organising maxi-blocks and heavy infrastructures to cross the river and connect with the rest of Shanghai by Metro. Expo in 2010 left the city few pavilions for reuse, and some large sport and convention amenities, but the rest was presented as “available” space equipped with infrastructure for urban development.

Studio research will serve to explore the Expo 2010 project’s capacity to evolve or introduce a derivative or second project with the aim of simulating the development of a major metropolitan centrality that straddles the two banks of the river as the site of central multifunctional activities that Shanghai could host in the mid- and long term.

Further, reflection on the regular city project as a powerful idea for present-day city design could provide a methodological basis for understanding the judicious proportion of the grid and the block composition system that is so important to the construction of a good city.

 

This studio has an irregular schedule. The official days of instruction are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, from 2-6pm. The primary instructor will be in residence during weeks of January 28, February 4, February 18, February 25, March 4, March 11, March 25, April 15, and April 22. Individual development and meetings with Dingliang Yang will take place on the remaining weeks. The primary instructor will be available on additional times outside of the officially scheduled studio sessions to make up for missed weeks.