Artists and designers increasingly work amid problems of global magnitude and local consequence, across the scales of the body, the city, and the planet. These conditions are at once economic, social, political, cultural, and ecological, and they rarely resolve into a single discipline or a single interest. This project-based seminar asks how art and design can engage that complexity, working across institutions, publics, and the conflicting stakes that bind them together.

The seminar is a design practice first. Rooted in socially engaged art and design, it develops tools and methods for making complexity visible: rendering hidden systems, spaces, and stakes perceptible, and moving that work across scales, from the quantum to the planetary. Students cross disciplinary boundaries and work in direct exchange with communities, policymakers, institutions, and experts, cultivating new forms of shared knowledge.

We take nuclear matters as our test case, chosen precisely for their extreme complexity: no other subject binds technology, power, land, gender, ecology, deep time, and competing institutional interests so tightly into a single knot. The atom split for energy and for war casts a long shadow over bodies, territories, and time. What began with the Manhattan Project did not end there. The science that built the bomb also built the first computers, and with them the first stirrings of artificial intelligence; the same logic of extraction and control now runs through uranium mines, reactors, waste repositories, and the data centers that feed our machines, whose surging hunger for energy is reopening the case for nuclear power itself. Nuclear matters are our lens, but not our boundary: the same logic of technological acceleration producing existential risk as a byproduct runs through artificial intelligence, climate breakdown, and other ways humanity is learning to threaten itself at scale. These are not parallel crises but the same crisis, expressed through different systems, at different speeds, with different but overlapping consequences. Much of this is engineered to stay out of sight, and much of it is estimated to outlast human existence.

Working in dialogue with UN agencies, including the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), we treat that invisibility as a design problem and nuclear matters as an intersectional lens. We ask what it takes to make hidden matters perceptible, who carries their burdens, how the institutions built to govern these risks are tested to their limits, and where the line between the governable and the ungovernable runs, and what design can offer in return, moving across fields in conversation with scientists, policymakers, communities, and artists.

The seminar includes lectures, conversations, and workshops. Over the semester, each student develops a single project, while experimenting with a variety of media such as visual documentation, spatial design at various scales, policy recommendation, and intervention in physical and virtual public space. The term ends with a collective presentation, where the work holds open not one timeline but several at once.

Note regarding the Fall 2026 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Wednesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Wednesday, September 9th.