Working in collaboration with several prominent institutions, this Open Project will engage students in the process and practice of designing and developing data visualizations of these institutions’ archival holdings.

Data visualization is not a neutral exercise in creating and communicating understanding. It need not involve computers. Members of the Open Project will pursue, evaluate and critique rhetorical & aesthetic gestures in the pursuit of knowledge creation through these archives.

Archives are never neutral, complete or perfectly accurate. They are always inscribed by power, history, practice, culture and other factors. Open Project members will investigate these archives through the tools they already have and will be invited to learn new tools and tool-making practices to address questions that arise through the process of making many visualizations over the course of the semester.

The Open Project will provide access to a range of leading designers and curators whose practices and knowledge offer productive models for thinking through these questions. Visits to sites, museums, and/or archives complement the studio work, and a series of guest lecturers, both from the partner organizations and elsewhere will provide their own perspectives.

The Open Project welcomes MDes candidates from across all four Domains (Narratives, Ecologies, Mediums, Publics), and will not require any particular technical baseline other than an ability to make and learn from what’s made. Deliverables from the Open Project will include drawings, sketches, observations and visualizations, as well as more developed and perhaps interactive digital visualizations. Volume of output will be as important as the quality of any “final” works. We will expect to iterate, revise, refine, make and learn from mistakes. We’ll be using visualization not only as a way to answer questions, but as a way to generate new kinds of questions through the process of making. These questions can then be potentially answered in different ways, whether through more visualization or other methods.

Each candidate will visualize some aspect of a different archive / collection involving the built or natural world. The work will be evaluated in their relationship to the creation of knowledge. The idea is not so much to fully represent the whole archive as it is to understand what it means to try to identify salient aspects of representation, gaps, or errors.

We’ll work with archives and collections, both on campus and off, to generate new kinds of questions and new modes of inquiry. Building on the successes and failures of last year’s workshop we’ll use new and old tools to investigate, interrogate, play, and otherwise dance. MoMA, American Museum of Natural History, Institute of Black Imagination, and Harvard Art Museums are the current partners. Programming experience is not required; we encourage vibe coding as a legitimate form of work. This is a course for people who want to engage in a state of flow and not be too attached to perfection. Making mistakes is a key part of this process.