Just as AI’s structure-forming transformer mechanism reshapes the landscape of language by modelling patterns of ‘attention’ across sequences, designers reshape the physical, atmospheric, and cultural terrains we inhabit, revealing that all meaning, whether linguistic or spatial, emerges from how elements relate to one another across time and space. This course explores how to make visible the temporal rhythms and spatial gradients that shape our physical and cultural landscapes using image sensors (image + film), AI-assisted abduction, and drawing to extend human perception, creating new forms of spatial awareness and design agency.

Issue
All forms have an ‘architecture’ that is an arrangement of material in space over time, determining their shape and behavior in a continual becoming. It is a palimpsest of conditional processes and properties, one that is flexible, adaptable, and displays a self-organizing dynamism emerging from the relationship between visible materials and the modulation of invisible gradients, flows, and forces. The resultant dynamic composition describes the forces that have shaped them, in which form translates the material registration of force as ‘a network of enveloped material processes’ as a complex temporal and material manifold of differential space.

Approach
Human perception operates within specific temporal frequency bands, missing both rapid fluctuations and slow environmental changes. By time-shifting data – compressing imperceptible slow processes and expanding fleeting events – we can remap environmental signals into perceptible windows, creating salience landscapes that reveal otherwise hidden patterns in any environmental system.

Drawing ‘attention’ to parallel events occurring across multiple temporal scales acts as both a sensorium and a scaffold that expands the potential of what we pay ‘attention’ to, how different scales of time interact with one another, and possibilities as to how we respond to them.

Spatial data (image & film) will be resampled to highlight emergent flows, feedback loops, and constraints. Students will learn to derive salience heatmaps from these transformed signals, grounding observations in real phenomena and honing pattern recognition skills, developing new forms of environmental literacy and design agency. The work explores how a reconceptualization of time and space can inform responsive and responsible approaches to the built environment that engage material and temporal dimensions through sensed and simulated landscapes.

The course is supported by the Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts. A weekly schedule of films will explore cinematic approaches to time and space, and a discussion with Godfrey Reggio, director of Koyaanisqatsi.

Outcomes
The class will address a range of questions, including: What are new ways of understanding and describing space in relationship to time(s)? How might this approach challenge and generate new conceptualizations of ‘site’? How might this work reframe new spatial environments not prioritized as extensions of humans, but as new configurations that 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?

Important note regarding the schedule:
Film screenings take place at the Carpenter Center on Tuesdays from 12-2:45. Students are strongly encouraged to attend screenings in person. Students with course schedule conflicts at this time will be permitted to view films outside of these hours. Schedule conflicts are not allowed for the 9-11:45 course period. Please contact the instructor for more information. 
 

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 9th.