Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices

The Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices Seminar investigates art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of contemporary culture, the city, and the planet. As artists and designers respond to challenges of global magnitude and their local impacts, 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.

Stemming from socially engaged art and design practices, this seminar aims to develop artistic tools and approaches that challenge disciplinary boundaries that crossover and interact with communities, policymakers, institutions, and various experts and help cultivate new forms of interdisciplinary knowledge.

As art and design practices move from art in public space to art in public interest (Miwon Kwon, One Place After the Other), 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, Agonistic Politics and Artistic Practice). Today, amid the climate emergency, militarized conflicts, mass migration, and deep-rooted inequalities of class, gender, and race, we need to reimagine visions, strategies, and pragmatic processes that allow new forms of life to flourish and attended care to others at the center (Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?).

With so much at stake, this semester the Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices will center on care: “maintaining, continuing, and repairing our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as fully as possible” (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care). Drawing on references from theory and practice, we will explore how artistic practice can critically engage with its surroundings and shape diverse visions and narratives of care across various scales and contexts–from the individual body to the collective, and from domestic spaces to a broader ecology–while examining the “connections that bind us, allowing us to see and acknowledge our shared experiences” (Tina Campt, Listening to Images).

Participants in the course will explore artistic tools and methods within their performance context and develop projects at the intersection of art, design, and activism. The course includes assignments, workshops, and a lecture series co-hosted with the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at the Harvard Divinity School, featuring discussions with artists, designers, curators, activists, and philosophers, including Anissa Touatti, Andrew Herscher, Emanuele Coccia, Elke Krasny, Jumana Manna, and Tatiana Bilbao.

Atmospheric Encounters: Visualizing the Invisible

Air is the invisible and indivisible planetary matter that constitutes all life. It is an agent of entanglement and interconnection, operating as a network of enveloped material processes that hold the world together while remaining seemingly indifferent to human endeavors. The air continuously signals and reframes the world in which we live, acting simultaneously to indicate future potentials and describe symptoms of the past. As the most prominent material we encounter every moment of every day, its commonality and invisible nature belies its fundamental role in supporting life on the planet.

Atmosphere, considered as both form and process, is a palimpsest of conditional processes and properties, one that is open-ended, flexible, and adaptable, displaying a self-organizing dynamism. It is defined and shaped by a collection of material processes that reflect dynamic ecological, economic, social, and technological conditions. The resultant dynamic formal composition of these phenomena inherently describes the forces that have shaped them, in which form translates the material registration of force as ‘a network of enveloped material processes’ and a complex temporal and material manifold of differential space.

The course will explore diverse atmospheric conditions with tools, techniques, and design methods for making the invisible visible. The project is to design, fabricate, and install an intervention on site that acts as both a digital sensor station able to precisely measure atmospheric change and an analog design intervention capable of registering and signaling change in real time and space of a selected atmospheric quality. The work acts as an ‘interplay between the corporeal and the technological’. The collected digital data is to be translated into a set of drawings/animations that visualize and redefine the space of the site and a collection of images/film of the intervention in space that makes visible the selected atmospheric condition in order to elucidate and reconceptualize the site. The aspiration is to explore the measuring and mapping of the air as matter oscillating between physical, digital, corporeal, and cultural definitions that redefine site as a landscape of living and lived space through atmospheric encounters.

Through the work the class will be asked to address a range of core questions including: What are new and emergent ways of understanding the atmospheric environment? How might this approach challenge and generate new understandings of space and conceptualizations of ‘site’? How might this work reframe a description, and a making of new environments not prioritized as extensions of humans, but rather as new configurations that include, and re-value, non-human agents? How might this generate new forms of engagement in response to issues of climate change? What conceptual shifts might this propagate, and how might this approach shape new forms of design practice?

The course is supported by the Harvard ArtLab. The final review and exhibition will be located at the ArtLab and participate in the ArtLab’s Open House event. Funding from the ArtLab will be available to support the production and exhibition of the projects in the course. Readings, lectures, and discussions will explore historical and contemporary theories, precedents, and installation design. Workshops will explore the making of digital sensors (Arduino), the collection and translation of data, drawing, and animation.

Public Space, Memory, and Social Dialogue

In the era of Anthropocene marked by the climate crisis, devastating wars, nuclear arms race, violent social divide and other crises, there is an urgent need for the new kind of monuments, memorials, and other commemorative projects that may contribute to the ending of perpetuation of mistakes and injustices of the past while advancing new visions for the responsible and informed future.  

This course is intended to inspire and guide discussion, research, and experiments in search for new directions in commemorative art and design.  

Student projects will be developed and presented in the context of readings, discussions, presentations, and guest visits with the focus on proactive participatory, discursive, performative, and dialogical approaches to the practice of memory.  

The project proposals may be envisaged as permanent, occasional, or temporary, mobile, or wearable, social media based, or AI assisted. They may be autonomous, complemental, or supplemental to the existing monuments and memorials, take form of participatory installations and projections, connect the distant from each other monuments, engage divided social groups and other sites of memory.

The class, individually or as a group, will have an opportunity to create a real scale media installation or video mapping projection that actively engage an existing architectural or sculptural site, interior or exterior, situated inside or outside the Harvard campus.

The course is open to all while MDes students from all Domains are particularly welcome and encouraged to join.

Drawing for Designers: Techniques of Expression, Articulation, and Representation

The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers, an expressive, playful supplement to computer-based labor.

This course will lead students to master techniques in hand drawing, refining sensitivity to all details of what one sees and developing capacity to articulate it in a visually convincing and evocative form.

The class projects will include work in outdoor and indoor situations and places as well as drawings of live models. In the process of drawing, students will focus on the world of lines, textures, shapes, light, shade, and values. We will use various tools, materials, and artistic techniques including pencils, vine charcoal, markers, ink, and other wet and dry media, later combined with the use of cameras, computer renderings, etc.

Throughout the duration of the course, students will complete three larger drawing projects and special short assignments.

In one nonrepresentational drawing project, students will focus on the formal articulation of emotional life experience. In another project, we will explore the performance of the human body in interaction with the built or natural environment. The final project will inspire viewers’ interaction with the architectural environment through the design and implantation of deliberately illusive site-specific drawings, physically inscribed on the Gund Hall interior walls.

In addition, students will participate in the field trips to sketch and draw in the outdoor environment.

Work on projects will be supplemented by presentations and discussions of relevant examples from art history and contemporary art. Guest artists will be invited as reviewers for the presentation and exhibition of final projects.
 

Students enrolled in VIS 2446 will be required to participate in three outdoor workshops and two site visits (Concord, MA and New York, NY), and will be responsible for ground transportation, meals, and incidentals for each of these site visits.

Paper or Plastic: Reinventing Shelf Life in the Supermarket Landscape

We tend to assume that supermarkets are static, neutral spaces where little of significance ever happens. The supermarket shelf is actually a highly volatile, hyper-competitive dynamic market landscape. On this shelf, products struggle to maximize every possible advantage, all in a ruthless effort to lure consumers away from competitors. However, what may have once been merely an issue of attention-grabbing graphics applied to packaging has quickly become much more complex. The contemporary consumer in today’s strained economy demands tangible value from the products that he/she consumes. To survive, brands must wrestle with new issues that include the ergonomics of the hand, the complex geometries of the refrigerator, and even sustainable material innovations that determine a product’s afterlife and its impact on the environment. These are multi-scalar, spatial life problems that designers are uniquely suited to address.

This seminar will ask students to operate as brand strategists. However, rather than invent new products, students will instead innovate upon existing brands. Outdated supermarket products will be reconsidered from the top down (brand identity, consumer target, logo, tagline, packaging, etc.). Students will also be required to study their product’s shelf competitors and will learn by presenting their observations through visual arguments rather than those that are explicitly verbal.

Each seminar will open with multimedia presentations on topics such as conducting demographic research, global color psychology, brand architecture, case studies in product launch failures, creating brand touchpoints, crafting a visual argument, and making an effective pitch. These conversations will be supplemented by readings from the business and financial sections of several newspapers, magazine articles, and blog interviews with brand experts.

The deliverables for the seminar will be presented in final review format in front of a cross-disciplinary jury of business luminaries. The output will include a full-scale 3-D print of the product redesign supplemented by graphical data, renderings, and digital animations. Ultimately, the seminar’s ambition is to make real a scenario that finds designers sitting at multiple tables, tackling issues of economics, technology, politics, and media at macro and micro scales.

Interior Residential Planning, Furnishings, and Materials

Buildings are inseparable from Interior Planning. The objective of this course is to design residential interiors. We will look at the Eastern Long Island residential architecture of Horace Gifford, Gwathmey Seigel, Norman Jaffe, Richard Meier, and Barbara and Julian Neski. The houses are all coastal and located between Fire Island and Montauk.  

The houses we will study were originally built as “beach houses” during the early 60’s through the late 70’s.  You will design both summer/weekend getaways and primary residences depending on the new occupant/s of the home.  We will study the reuse of these homes through renovation and preservation of the interiors in the context of increasing real estate and land values on the east end of Long Island.

A client for each project will be identified.  A written brief will be developed to guide planning and design thinking for the interior of each home and to meet the needs of the new contemporary resident/s.
Students will work individually and in groups. Students will create plans, elevations, renderings, models, material boards and other appropriate presentation methods to elaborate the projects and obtain client approvals.  Teamwork and presentation skills will be emphasized and are part of student evaluation.

The planning exercises will be reinforced through the study of modern and contemporary furniture, textiles, color, and materials for interior specification.

Teams will participate in the critique of each other’s work. The review, comparison, and editing of the projects will help each team gain insight, define similarities and differences, and establish overall themes in planning. A midterm and final project will be assigned and reviewed by a jury of external of professionals.
 

Digital Media: Not Magic

According to folklore, Michelangelo fell to his knees upon seeing the Florentine fresco Annunciation, went silent, and eventually concluded that the image of the Virgin must have been made through divine intervention since its brushwork surpassed human talents. When the computer graphics company Blue Sky released its commercial for Chock Full o’Nuts in 1994, The New York Times called the rendering of a walking and talking coffee bean “computer magic.” It was the best way to explain the video’s special effects. What else would one call using lines of code to give an inanimate object life? Or the transfiguration of mere paint into saintly likeness?

Esoteric processes have long imbued artforms with power, rendering audiences speechless, awestruck, and affected. In the nineties, anthropologist Alfred Gell proposed that mundane things can be construed as “enchanted forms” when differences exist between an audience’s technological expectations and an object’s facture. This contradiction gives rise to a belief that artifacts and artisans can possess otherworldly faculties. In reality, everyday forms become enchanted not through magic, but through precise construction methodologies.

This course seeks to articulate what aesthetic categories are at play when technology is perceived to be magical. A working theory for the class is that more nuanced descriptions for the transformations found in computational and craft traditions are good frameworks for understanding architectural effects. We will explore these ideas in synchronous lectures and case studies, and asynchronous workshops. Readings include texts by Alfred Gell, Walter Benjamin, Beatriz Colomina, and Felicity Scott. Case studies include projects by Anne Holtrop, Ensamble, Junya Ishigami, and examples from imperial architecture.

Note: Class discussion is held in a debate format.
 

Landscape Representation I

The first in a two-semester sequence, Landscape Representation I introduces students to the rich and varied discipline of landscape architecture as inextricably intertwined with the concept of representation. This relationship is grounded in landscape’s history and conventions, and expanded through a wide range of techniques that embrace the highly generative agency of representation in the design process.

These explorations will be supported by tutorials introducing techniques, skills, and workflows that engage both analog and digital methodologies, from physical modeling and hand drawing to software such as Rhino and the Adobe Creative Suite. Students will iterate between different modes of abstraction and translation to understand both site and agent as imagined, created, and ultimately designed through their various representations.

Spatial Analysis [Module 1]

Planning decisions are often idealized as being "evidence-based" or "data-driven." Spatial data often comprise the data and evidence that support such these decisions. In this course, you will learn how to create spatial datasets, both by assembling them from existing sources and by collecting data in the field. You will also learn data visualization techniques to identify spatial relationships within and between spatial datasets. You will learn to identify the arguments that mapmakers make through their maps and to use spatial data visualization to make your own arguments. Student in this course are expected to have completed the preterm workshop for MUP students and software tutorials on ArcGIS, R, and RStudio.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Representation for Planners [Module 1]

One task of an urban planner is to grapple with and understand a series of complicated processes that directly affect the organization and experience of place. Social, cultural, political, and economic forces all influence the complexity of a site. The planner must interpret these forces, arrive at a position in response to them, and make them legible to a wide array of stakeholders. Beyond the proposed plan and strategy, another critical contribution of the planner is to communicate, persuade, and be an agent for reaching consensus among competing agendas.

While urban planners need to communicate through a variety of means, visual representation of abstract concepts and processes is a skill needed to speculate and make intelligible ideas on the future of urbanism and the environment. Effective visualizations not only support verbal proposals but can stand alone as standalone artifacts that communicate new information to their audience.

In the service of these various roles, Representation for Planners provides first semester urban planning students with the graphic and technical skills needed to reason, design, and communicate. Students will learn the basics of visual representation and gain familiarity with the technical tools essential for making maps and exploring relationships in the physical, regulatory, and demographic dimensions of the built environment. Additionally, we will use computer software and modeling tools, such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and SketchUp to distill ideas into effective graphic presentations. Each program presents opportunities to communicate visual information in different ways and, over the course of the class, workflows to operate between programs will be reinforced. Students will learn how these techniques can be used as part of the planning process itself and communicate with broader audiences.

The general structure for each week is as follows—on Tuesdays, a conceptual underpinning of representation will be presented with specific examples. Students will engage a specific exercise on Thursday classes synthesizing the representational techniques presented on Tuesday with the software skills introduced. Readings will also be discussed at the beginning of class.

This half-semester module works in tandem with Course 2128, Spatial Analysis.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.