Philosophy of Technology: From Marx and Heidegger to AI, Genome Editing, and Geoengineering (HKS)
Technology shapes how power is exercised in society, and thereby also changes how the present changes into the future. Technological innovation is all around us, and new possibilities in fields like artificial intelligence, genome-editing and geoengineering not only reallocate power, but might transform human life considerably, to the point of modifying the essence of what it is to be human. Basic attitudes towards technology vary considerably. At times it is tech optimism that dominates the debates (sometimes even a techno-boosterism that sees technology as key to heaven on earth), and at other times it is more low-spirited attitudes ranging from romantic uneasiness to doom-and-gloom Luddism and technology-bashing. A closer look at these various attitudes – and reflection on how technology and power are intertwined — will help generate a more skeptical attitude towards all of them and contribute to a more level-headed debate, which is so badly needed. While ethical considerations will enter prominently, the philosophy of technology is broader than its ethics. It aims to interpret and critically assess the role of technology for human life and guide us to a more thoughtful integration of technology in our individual lives and in public decision making. This course aims to teach you to do just that, starting with basic stances and key figures in the field and then progressing towards challenges around technology as they will arise for the 21st century.
This course is jointly-listed with HKS as DPI-207.
Immersive Landscape: Representation through Gaming Technology
"Soon will come plausible alternatives to our world. You may have failed in this one but what if you had a million new chances in a million different new worlds?”
The course is aimed at investigating new ways to interpret, conceive and describe landscape and architecture. While traditional methods of representation will prevail for some time, they make the cognitive process a one-way circumstance with an “emitter” and a “listener” that barely interact. Game technologies permit the creation of realistic, oneiric, utopian as well as dystopian universes. It is possible to use, disregard, twist, bend or re-invent the laws of physics, the flow of time, the hazards of weather, the perception of depth, but most importantly, it permits absolute freedom.
Just as Rome wasn't built in a day, connections will need to be made through studies of landscape representation in the arts, movies and, not surprisingly, video games. Through the investigation, conception and construction of virtual “altered states” you will amass the techniques required to maturate your ideas from the early stages of preparatory work to the deployment phase, bearing in mind that technical skills matter less than the search for astute and imaginative solutions. Game fabrication should be envisaged as a mental layout where elements have to be structured and formulated in a way that they are not perceived as being intrusive, unless, of course, you want them to be.
Some of the topics covered include: “mastering planning and research”, “Strategies of representations”, “realising a graphic style”, “creating meshes and textures for game engines”, “building nature”, “realistic vs. non realistic approaches”, “sound design”, “navigation and interaction”, “document.write(“Hello World!”)”, “targeting different platforms”, “having fun” –
while it's not exactly technical, it's a fundamental notion that should not be lost, especially when talking about games.
The theme of this year is "Gamma World", a journey into a troubled future built upon mutations and ruins. All we can hope is that the continuum of time can be reversed to avoid its final collapse. Exploring this cataclysmic future end-of-the-world scenario with it’s origins rooted in the context of an 80’s environment, old school with no trace of smart phones or google, instead we find DOS, big hair, breakdance, neon and shoulder pads. Of the most memorable from this period would surely be the sounds, the era of synthesisers and the advent of computer technology.
Our software of choice will be “Unreal", a real time 3D engine serving as industry standard in game world creation and simulation (most of the processes can actually be easily transferred to other engines). “Cinema 4D”, because of its very stable and simple workflow, will be used for most of the 3D operations. Students familiar with other 3D packages are free to use them as a possible replacement. However, the most important tools will be a pencil, a piece of paper and your brain.
You can check https://www.immersivelandscape.org to browse through some sample projects from the last two sessions.
Course structure:
The weekly class will be divided into three parts. The first one will focus on theory, methods, and criticism; the second on the technical, where we will be put into practice what has been already investigated. Finally, the third part will be interviews with selected, relevant guests.
On Tuesdays, attendance will be required from 10 to 12 pm EST. Additionally, 1 hour of asynchronous materials will be made available.
Three intermediate assignments will lead to the final.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the <a href="https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/live
Urban Politics, Planning, and Development (at HKS)
In the face of failures and dysfunction at the national level, the welfare- and democracy-enhancing potential of cities has come into focus in recent years. Yet, not all cities are able to realize their promise as democratic engines of economic growth and human development. Why some fail, while others succeed depends crucially on the politics and governance practices that shape cities and metropolitan regions. Understanding the politics of urban planning and development is therefore fundamental to unlocking the potential of our cities to boost the wealth, health, and well-being of citizens and communities in ways that are sustainable and equitable. This course focuses on urban politics in the United States and Europe. Key topics include U.S. and European urban politics viewed in the large, and more specifically the politics of land-use, economic development, housing, water, policing, and transit. Cross-cutting themes include: the role of business and non-profits in local governance; citizen participation and urban social movements; the importance of race, ethnicity, and class in shaping group conflict and co-operation at the local level; as well as the costs and benefits of local government fragmentation. The course involves in-class exercises, group work, and simulations, as well as guest lectures. Most class sessions build off single-city case studies, including written and multi-media cases on Atlanta, Copenhagen, Detroit, Madrid, Naples, New Orleans, New York, Pittsburgh, San Juan, Seattle, and Stuttgart.
The course purposes are twofold: (1) to enhance your sophistication in thinking about and analyzing the factors and conditions that shape political and planning processes at the urban level and what their consequences are; and (2) to hone your skills in thinking strategically about how to exercise influence in and on these decision processes.
Native Americans in the 21st Century: Nation Building II (at HKS)
This community based research course focuses on some of the major issues Native American Indian tribes and nations face in the 21st century. It provides in-depth, hands-on exposure to native development issues, including: sovereignty, economic development, constitutional reform, leadership, health and social welfare, tribal finances, land and water rights, culture and language, religious freedom, and education. In particular, the course emphasizes problem definition, client relationships, and designing and completing a research project for a tribe, tribal department, or those active in Indian Country. The course is devoted primarily to preparation and presentation of a comprehensive research paper based on work with a tribal community. In addition to faculty presentations on topics such as field research methods and problem definition, students will make presentations on their work in progress and ultimate findings.
Also offered by the Harvard Kennedy School as DEV 505, the Graduate School of Education as A-102 and the Faculty of Arts and Science as EMR-121.
Creating Real Estate Ventures: a Legal Perspective
This course will examine, through the lens of the legal documentation involved at each step, how a complex commercial real estate deal is put together, from conception to completion. We will review the major stages of commercial real estate development including (a) securing control of land, (b) sourcing and raising equity, (c) completing predevelopment steps including agreements for design and construction and obtaining governmental permits, (d) obtaining construction financing, (e) operating the project, and (f) realizing capital returns from refinance and/or sale. We will also consider steps which may be taken in the legal arena when a deal goes sideways, such as bankruptcy, lease or loan modifications and litigation.
We will analyze actual negotiated agreements used in each stage, including purchase and sale contracts, joint venture agreements, construction and design contracts, construction loan agreements, tenant leases, and permanent loan documentation. The course will include a mix of lectures, discussion of transaction documents and other course readings, participation in negotiation scenarios and individual exercises, guest appearances by experienced attorneys and real estate professionals involved in major projects in the greater Boston area, and “virtual” site visits to projects recently completed or under construction.
The goal of the course is to enable students to get deep inside the series of transactions–and their legal documentation– that produce development projects, to understand key business and legal issues embedded in the legal documents and how they are often resolved, and to recognize how to manage legal risk and the risk/reward calculation. There is no prerequisite for taking the course or any need for prior legal experience.
Lectures and in-class discussions and exercises, which will predominate, will be synchronous. However, the course will include assignments and mock negotiation exercises in which the students will work in teams on a flexible synchronous basis to be scheduled by the student teams themselves. Lectures and guest speakers may also be recorded for asynchronous viewing by students who are unable to participate during the scheduled times.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
Climate Justice
Recent discourse around climate change—including debates about the Anthropocene, Green New Deal legislation, the plight of climate refugees, the dire warnings of the IPCC 1.5°C report, to name a few—increasingly make evident that climate change is much more than a technological problem of carbon mitigation. Taking recent geological and climatic changes as symptoms of deeper structural challenges, this class will address climate change as fundamentally a problem of social and environmental justice. The class will therefore combine study of theories of justice, inequality, and structural violence with a deep dive into climate science, policy, and international diplomacy. In our search for climate justice, the class will trace various forms of climate activism within the history of environmental movements, explore non-Western forms of knowledge as key critiques and logics of action, and evaluate concrete suggestions for radical reform. We will discuss how climate justice as a framework of concern is both universal and specific, and we will critically engage ideas of justice at different scales, from the local to the global, with careful attention to context. We will ultimately ask what new kinds of practices, knowledges, and collaborations are necessary to build more just and responsible relationships between people and the nonhuman world, and with each other.
Justice: Ethics in an Age of Pandemic and Racial Reckoning (at FAS)
What is a just society? What do we owe one another as citizens? What is a good life? These questions, long debated by philosophers, arise with special urgency at a time of pandemic and racial reckoning.
The course explores these questions by considering how philosophers have tried to answer them, and by debating contemporary issues—in politics and everyday life–that prompt us to ask: What’s the right thing to do? Topics include controversies about equality and inequality, individual rights and the common good, the role of government and markets, and competing conceptions of identity and community. Cases include ethical questions arising from the pandemic and recent debates about racial justice.
This is a University course. All students should enroll in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences version of the course, GENED 1171
Justice is a University Course, which means that students from all Harvard schools are able to enroll. Enrollment is limited to 750. Students who submit a petition to enroll by August 21 will have priority.
Graduate students must submit a petition to enroll through my.harvard by 11:59 p.m. Friday, August 21. If interest requires a lottery, it will be run on Monday, August 24, at which time your petition will be either approved or denied. If approved, your seat will be held until your school’s registration deadline. Visit the Fall 2020 Gen Ed web page for more information and step-by-step instructions.
Class meetings integrate video materials with live discussion—sometimes with the class as a whole, sometimes in small breakout sessions. Due to the participatory nature of the course, students are expected to attend all class meetings. Those unable to attend in the morning are welcome to attend the evening version of the course (M and W, 7:30-8:45pm). This is not a recorded version of the morning class, but a live, participatory session covering the same material and led by Dr. Sergio Imparato. All students will also have a weekly, small group discussion section.
Real Estate Private Equity [M2]
Real Estate Private Equity explores, in depth, the analysis, decision-making and challenges private equity investors face when:
1. making and structuring highly leveraged investments,
2. managing investments through turbulence if market difficulties emerge,
3. developing superior, differentiated portfolio strategies and successfully aligning these with institutional capital,
4. procuring and managing sources of equity and debt capital,
5. negotiating institutional investor capital agreements, local partner operating agreements and transaction execution agreements,
6. managing all the stakeholders involved in complicated real estate transactions when circumstances require change,
7. successfully building and managing their organizations for long-term sustainability in the midst of having to compete in an environment fraught with constant risk, uncertainty and geo-political and economic fluctuation.
The course will be structured in a format using actual business cases, where each case will tackle a situation and specific set of challenges faced by private equity investment groups. Cases will typically be 20 to 30 pages in length including a number of subsidiary agreements and schedules. Students will need to lay out the problems being addressed, probe the situation, develop the right questions to focus on, analyze the relevant data, and evaluate the best courses of action along with their anticipated outcomes. Case situations will be viewed from multiple perspectives: the private equity investor, their institutional capital sources, local operating partners, lending institutions, tenants, and many times public authorities and their representatives.
There are two modules that comprise the course. Each module will last ½ of the semester. Students have the option of taking just module 1 for two credits, or both modules 1 and 2 for 4 credits.
In module 1 we will be covering 5 business cases. The subjects of investigation and discussion will include
1. analyzing an international development/redevelopment joint venture opportunity,
2. examining the process of investing in debt securities in a complex transaction,
3. assessing a hostile tender offer of a public company and examining the responsibilities to all of the stakeholders in making the right decisions,
4. from an investment committee member’s perspective examining, evaluating and choosing between two disparate competing investment opportunities, a joint venture acquisition of a student housing project against a mezzanine debt investment in an international real estate operating service company,
5. Deriving what the optimum path forward should be in the launch and capitalization a new startup real estate development company.
In module 2, students will be tackling an independent study research paper which delves deeper into a topic of choosing in real estate private equity. Some potential areas to pursue include:
1. Developing a business plan to start a new real estate PE firm,
2. Evaluating the strategy and long term competitive viability of an existing real estate PE firm,
3. Analyzing a live, complicated real estate PE transaction,
4. Investigating and conducting a comprehensive research report to evaluate a given market opportunity,
It is expected that papers delivered for module 2 will be approximately 20-25 pages in length, single spaced, plus exhibits, quantitative analyses, and appendices.
Course prerequisites: 5275 and 5276 or other course equivalents, and 7449 (module 1).
Digital Media: Not Magic
According to folklore, Michelangelo fell to his knees upon seeing the Florentine fresco Annunciation, went silent, and eventually concluded that the image of the Virgin must have been made through divine intervention since its brushwork surpassed human talents. When the computer graphics company Blue Sky released its commercial for Chock Full o’Nuts in 1994, The New York Times called the rendering of a walking and talking coffee bean “computer magic.” It was the best way to explain the video’s special effects. What else would one call using lines of code to give an inanimate object life? Or the transfiguration of mere paint into saintly likeness?
Esoteric processes have long imbued artforms with power, rendering audiences speechless, awestruck, and affected. In the nineties, anthropologist Alfred Gell proposed that mundane things can be construed as “enchanted forms” when differences exist between an audience’s technological expectations and an object’s facture. This contradiction gives rise to a belief that artifacts and artisans can possess otherworldly faculties. In reality, everyday forms become enchanted not through magic, but through precise construction methodologies.
This course seeks to articulate what aesthetic categories are at play when technology is perceived to be magical. A working theory for the class is that more nuanced descriptions for the transformations found in computational and craft traditions are good frameworks for understanding architectural effects. We will explore these ideas in synchronous lectures and case studies, and asynchronous workshops. Readings include texts by Alfred Gell, Walter Benjamin, Beatriz Colomina, and Felicity Scott. Case studies include projects by Anne Holtrop, Ensamble, Junya Ishigami, and examples from imperial architecture.
Prerequisites: none
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
Digital Media: Writing Form
This course offers an introduction to the field of design and computation through the essential pursuit of writing form.
Setting aside the better-known paradigms of sketching, 3D modelling, scripting or coding, writing –in this context– refers to the application of parametric formulations to visual design. This is not only a technology offering, but a place for designers to expand their understanding of architectural typology, and form in general, by taking on the new, sneaky types which emerged during the past 20 years.
This crash course in indexical modelling (the deployment of variable analytic surfaces to parametrically define the space, boundaries, structure, and tectonic texture of a three-dimensional construct) will be organised around synchronous weekly lectures and applied workshops in parametric design, punctuated by three to four design sketches, and a final design project. The deliverables will include virtual instances of physical models —presented via AR (augmented reality) as well as traditional drawings and diagrams.
On the theoretical side, the course will introduce participants to the notion of form both practically (mathematically) and theoretically through a series of semi-monthly reading precepts (group readings) of seminal texts from Erwin Panofsky to Rosalind Krauss.
On the practical side, generative design tools will include PTC MathCAD 15, Rhino 6 /Grasshopper, and the proprietary, third-party Grasshopper plugins Surf_TM, Millipede, and Weaverbird. No experience is necessary, just open-mindedness. Participants will be issued powerful software templates to work with on a weekly basis.
Course structure: During the two, one-hour-long live sessions, we will cover the lectures material, hold one directed reading, share feedback on the assignments, dispense some technical content, and touch on any other matter of group interest. The bulk of the technical workshops will be pre-recorded and released asynchronously every week in digital video form.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.