The second semester MDE studio provides an opportunity for students to expand, hone, and deepen project-based design engineering capabilities acquired in the first term through a focus on advanced methods, skills, and theory critical to relevant design practice within our rapidly changing 21st century context. Beginning with a targeted exploration of the scientific and cultural mechanisms upon which contemporary design impact is contingent, the bulk of the term will focus on the iterative development of a single design engineering project through a rigorous cadence of design prototypes. The studio brief, entitled Our Artificial Nature: Designing for More-than-Human Systems, is designed and deployed across a series of cumulative assignments and corollary deliverables to address core areas of advanced project-based design engineering knowledge in response to the imperatives of our time.

Through response to the project brief, and within the context of collaborative project development in groups of three or four, students will acquire design intelligence across the following knowledge areas within the design engineering domain: 
1. Design ethics and values sensitive design methods
2. Criticism, connoisseurship, and design collaboration skills
3. Critical approaches to systems as social, economic, technological, scientific, ecological, and temporal conditions within which design is situated as a change agent
• Analytic, generative, and communicative systems mapping: approaches to systems integration across design phases
• Sociotechnical approaches to human <  > non-human interaction including ANT (actor-network theory) and HCI (human-computer interaction) principles
4. Advanced prototyping across phases of design and layers of digital and physical interactivity
• Engagement with design engineering as a rigorous form of cultural production, including contemporary visual culture
• Integration and articulation of core models, hypotheses, and theory driving project design with increased scientific and technical rigor; through writing as well as abstract modes of visual communication
• Field validation, including user testing

The studio is limited for first-year students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering Program, a collaborative degree program associated with Harvard GSD and SEAS.