SCI-6505

Systems as Spaces of Care

Taught by
Justin W. Cook
Location & Hours
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Semester
Type
Project-based Seminar
4 Units

Course Website

At the critical intersection where the built environment meets human vulnerability, care is an urgent spatial and clinical practice, and a systemic challenge. From overcrowded hospital corridors to intimate domestic settings, from community mutual aid networks to urban clinical networks–care is mediated through architectures of power, policy, protocols, and material infrastructure, and human/machine perception that are largely invisible. This advanced project-based seminar positions care as a spatial, cultural, and systemic phenomenon demanding rigorous architectural intervention. Drawing on methodologies from complexity science, strategic design, and critical clinical practice, students will interrogate how care is produced, constrained, and circulated through built and systemic forces. The course directly confronts dominant paradigms in health and wellness environments–paradigms characterized by fragmentation, institutional and medicolegal constraints, and disparities in access–by revealing and challenging the hidden systems that govern the human experience and provision of care.