Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Problems (at FAS)

This course will provide a framework (and multiple lenses) through which to think about the salient economic and social problems of the five billion people of the developing world, and to work in a team setting toward identifying entrepreneurial solutions to such problems. Case study discussions will cover challenges and solutions in fields as diverse as health, education, technology, urban planning, and arts and the humanities. The modules themselves will be team-taught by faculty from engineering, the arts, urban design, healthcare and business. The course will embrace a bias toward action by enabling students to understand the potential of individual agency in addressing these problems. All students will participate in the development of a business plan or grant proposal to tackle their chosen problem in a specific developing country/region, emphasizing the importance of contextualizing the entrepreneurial intervention. The student-team will ideally be comprised of students with diverse backgrounds from across the University.

No prerequisites. Jointly offered at Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) as SW47, Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) as DEV-338, Harvard  T. H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) as GHP-568, Harvard Medical School as IND 520, Harvard Graduate School of Design (DES) as SES 5375, and Harvard Law School (HLS) as 2543.

 

Classes will be held on Harvard University Cambridge campus in Sever Hall room 113.

Offered jointly with the Business School as 1266, the School of Public Health as GHP 568, the Kennedy School as PED-338, the Law School as HLS 2543 and the Graduate School of Education as A-819.

HBS: Fall; Q1Q2; 3 credits

NO AUDITORS. The course is designed around active participation and the completion of a final group project.

LIT: A Survey and Design Research Seminar of Architectural Lighting (Module F1)

Light defines what and how we see; our bodies are intimately tied to cycles of light and dark. Light is also a multi-billion dollar industry selling countless styles of electronic technologies designed for integration into buildings, landscapes, and urban spaces. This module surveys these many shades of light: its effects, metrics, technologies, and logics. We will review vision and color, perception psychology, design with daylight and LEDs, photometric visualization and analysis, media architecture, circadian rhythms, and the expansive industry of lighting products and nefarious characters. Open to anyone interested in light, students will choose to either experiment with a lighting design project, or research a topic their choice. Each session will be split between lecture or local field trip and workshop practicum. To pursue the design project, recommended prior or current enrollment in 6122 Environmental Systems (or similar course), and/or 2223 Immersive Environments. Assessment will be based on engagement in class, efforts, and work product. 

Architectural Acoustics (Module F2)

What does jazz sound like when it is played in a cathedral? How would Gregorian chant sound in a jazz club? And why do footsteps in the apartment above so often sound from downstairs like a herd of elephants?

Architectural acoustics entails architectural design, human perception, material properties, and building systems. Sound and architecture are intrinsically linked. This class will address how buildings respond to and enhance our aural experiences, and how designers can shape the aural environment.

Topics covered:
Topics include the basics of sound and hearing, the acoustic properties of materials, room acoustics, sound transmission, and the acoustics of performance halls. Along the way we’ll touch on computer modeling and acoustics simulation, building systems noise control, the urban soundscape, and other topics.

Objectives and outcomes:
Students will develop a basic understanding of the principles of architectural acoustics: how we hear and perceive sound both indoors and outdoors, appropriate criteria for listening environments, and how architectural decisions of layout, materials, room shape, and design impact what we hear in and around a space. By the end of the module, students will develop sensitivity to the way that architecture affects what we hear, and will be able to implement fundamental design principles that profoundly affect building functionality, our auditory perception, and our sense of space.

Course format and method of evaluation:
This six-week seminar class will meet once weekly for a three-hour seminar that will also include field trips, listening exercises, and hands-on experience with acoustical measurement equipment.

Readings that supplement class discussion will be required most weeks. There will be weekly homework assignments (field reports, problem sets, or short research papers), and one major final project. Students will be graded on the weekly assignments, the final project, and their contributions to class discussions.

Prerequisites:
None.

 

Water, Land-Water Linkages, and Aquatic Ecology

This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, and contribute to protecting, improving, restoring, and sustaining water resources. Emphasis will be placed on both the science and the application of this science in designs for projects involving a wide range of interactions with water including coastlines, inland rivers and lakes, and urban stormwater. With ongoing global changes in climate, urbanization, and the use of water for energy and food production, the relationship between humans and water will continue to grow and evolve. Students will come away from this course with a better understanding of this evolution and how designs can account for hydrologic change and adaptation. While many varied case studies will be discussed throughout the semester, the course content will be discussed in the context of four primary project and research areas:

Discussion of these focus areas will include design challenges, social issues, permitting, and the implementation process. Students will come away with a better understanding of how projects go from conceptual design to a constructed site. Students will be encouraged to bring water and ecology-related projects/challenges from other courses, studios, or projects to the class for an open discussion. This ‘Ecological Seminar’ will be an opportunity for students to cross-pollinate with other studios and departments and receive critical and helpful feedback for their projects.  Hands-on exercises include watershed delineation, hydrologic calculations to estimate runoff and groundwater infiltration and flow, design exercises developing recommendations for stormwater best-management-practices/low-impact design (LID) for neighborhood in Washington, DC, and research and design exercises for river restoration projects. Attendance at two fieldtrips with hands-on field sampling will be mandatory: a 2-day weekend field trip to Plymouth and an in-class fieldtrip to the Alewife stormwater facility.

Evaluation: Based on class attendance and participation (including field trips), short written assignments, quizzes, focused design exercises, and a semester-long project.

BROWNFIELDS: Remediation and Regeneration Practices

‘A Brownfields Site is real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence, or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant or contaminant”
-From the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act known as the ‘Brownfield Act’ January 2002

This course concerns the reclamation of land altered by prior industrial, manufacturing, commercial and other active uses and in particular those that are derelict, environmentally hazardous and located within neighborhoods and/or close to residential communities. The subject matter addresses recent advances in the legal, regulatory, environmental, and economic and community landscape as well as the remediation of despoiled land in a manner that reclaims and redevelops these sites for future uses. Of interest to the instructor is how these advances can inform more progressive and creative planning research and design work, and conversely, to what extent planning and design work can direct the regeneration and reuse of these urban environments. Under consideration this semester is the class of sites commonly known as ‘brownfields' or ‘brownfield lands'. The class will visit local sites in Somerville and Lowell, MA as well as consider the subject globally. A class assignment will research the subject though international case studies.

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, oniric, 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 acquire the techniques required to develop 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 smart and imaginative solutions. Game fabrication should be envisaged as a mental layout where elements have to be structured and organized in a way that they are not perceived as being intrusive, unless, of course, you want them to be.

Some of the topics that will be covered include: “mastering planning and research”, “Strategies of representations”, “the finding of a graphic style”, “creating meshes and textures for game engines”, “building nature in Unity”, “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 speaking of games.The classes will be divided in two parts, alternating weekly, where one class will be focused on theory, methods, and criticism, and the other will focus more on the technical, where will be put into practice what has been investigated. Both sessions will include lecturers and other guests.

Our software of choice will be “Unity3D” (https://unity3d.com), a real time 3D engine, which is an industry standard in game creation and simulation (most of the processes can actually be easily transferred to other engines). “Cinema 4D” (https://www.maxon.net/en/products/cinema-4d/overview/) , 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. Still, the most important tools will be a pencil, a piece of paper and your brain.

Landscape Representation III: Landform and Ecological Process

Landscape Representation III examines the relationship between terrain and the landscape it supports and engenders. It aspires to explore and challenge the representational conventions of land-forming, and support a Landscape Architecture design process that posits the landscape as a relational assemblage. It explores a description of the making of land-form through its inherent material performance in relationship to ecological processes that describe its connectability to the ordering and making of the landscape that is a reciprocation of forces between itself and its context at specific scales.

Measures of time will be utilised to describe and design the landscape through a comparison of sequence and event, and their intervals, rates and duration in relationship to spatial forces and flows. Time infuses the material reality of the landscape through states of formation, from those that signify stability, through to sequences that are predictable and observable processes of change, and those that are uncertain and instantaneous.

Representation is approached as an activity of thinking and making in which knowledge is generated through the work. This facilitates an iterative process of reflection in action enabling testing in which new knowledge informs subsequent design decisions.

The course will introduce methods of associative and generative modelling, and quantitative and qualitative analysis visualised through multiple forms of media. These are decision making models conceived to imbue interaction between evidence-based variables and design input.

Precedent studies will accompany an engagement in digital media, with fluid transitions between documentation and speculation, 2D and 3D, static and dynamic, illustrating time-based processes.

Lectures and lab exercises will provide the foundation for exploration and discussion and an exposure to a set of digital techniques for analysing and generating landform processes to advance technical and conceptual ability, as well as to provide a point of departure for an in-depth awareness of landscape precedents and representational techniques.

Digital Media: Image

Over the past three decades the architectural process has been drastically reorganized by what historian Jonathan Crary calls “a transformation in the nature of visuality probably more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance perspective.” Architecture’s previously stable graphical conventions have dissolved and been replaced with an ever expanding repertoire of computational mediums, originally not designed for the architectural imagination.

If we acknowledge that architecture has for centuries produced new ideas and forms by treating representational media as spaces of visual exploration, how might techniques that belong to computational media—which often, however unintentionally, seem to prioritize “workflow optimization” at the expense of experimentation—be made to serve this same experimental function? Any such inquiry entails imagining and testing methods by which computational image making (or what Friedrich A. Kittler calls computer graphics) might be at times used to disrupt the smooth workflows which presently define digital fabrication culture. It also involves thinking carefully about how the history of form and tectonics—which architectural drawing managed so well for centuries—might be preserved and extended within the paradigm of these new digital media.

Students will be exposed to a diverse set of precedents in computer graphics, ranging from early video art practices to more recent experiments in compression aesthetics. Case studies will be paired with exercises involving technical processes that have generally been regarded as lying outside the domain of architectural practice, but which might now be used profitably as a way of opening up and expanding architecture’s own digital culture. In this sense, the course is interested in an expansion and revision of the notion of “digital representation” in architecture.

There are no prerequisites for this class, and no special software skills are required, only a willingness to explore various media in unconventional ways. Students will be encouraged to hybridize existing graphic and fabrication platforms.

Digital Media: Design Systems

The course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, methods and practical techniques in design computation with emphasis on a systems perspective. We take a view that computational design requires designing of systems instead of forms/geometries directly and that the quality of such systems reflect the success of the design outcome.

A system can be understood as a set of detailed procedures to achieve a specific objective, which takes input data/signal and transforms it into output/feedback. To design a computational system, it is necessary to adopt a particular way of thinking: identifying, abstracting, and decomposing a design goal. In addition, the data and procedures to achieve the goal requires the use of logical and numerical constructs. On the contrary to such a reductionist approach, it is important to note the output of a design system needs to be accessible to human thoughts for holistic and intuitive evaluation. In other words, the perspective of system helps elucidate the different modes of thinking embedded within the use of the digital medium for design.

The course will be comprised of three learning segments: (a) computational and geometric notations, (b) data organization and algorithms, (c) data flow and design control; introduced through a series of lectures and hands-on workshops. Students will create, analyze, and evaluate computational and geometric constructs within design-as-a-system thought-paradigm. Simultaneously, the course provides students with the basis for developing critical thinking towards computational tools through working on a series of design exercise and a final project. We will use Rhino, Grasshopper environment and C# where we expect the students to be familiar with 3D modelling and basic digital fabrication such as laser cutting and 3D printing. It is designed for architecture students with little programming experience who are interested in understanding the underlying principles of computational tools and customization of design processes using the tools. The success of students is evaluated not solely on technical accomplishments but according to the integrity of the produced design processes and products in engaging the given theoretical concepts.

 

Spatial Analysis and the Built Environment

Urban planners engage in many complex processes that defy easy representation. This course provides first-semester urban planning students with the graphic and technical skills needed to reason, design and communicate these processes with geospatial data. This knowledge will be embedded within a larger critical framework that addresses the cultural history of categorization, data collection and cartography as tools of persuasion for organizing space.

Visual expression is one of the most compelling methods to describe the physical environment, and students will learn techniques specifically geared towards clarifying social, political and economic dynamics and how they relate the structuring of spaces. The class will introduce fundamentals of data collecting, data formatting and data importing into a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment.

Students will gain familiarity with the technical tools essential to GIS for making maps and exploring relationships in the physical, regulatory and demographic dimensions of the landscape. Within GIS, students will learn the basics of geospatial processing to produce new forms of knowledge in support of ideas about urban planning and design. Desktop publishing tools, including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign will be used to distil ideas into effective graphic presentations. The class will also advance techniques for representing form and space through diagramming and three-dimensional modeling programs.

Students will be introduced to workflows that demonstrate how to move effectively between data from these platforms and modes of representation. Class lectures will be complemented with technical workshops.

Objectives:
1. Establish a conceptual framework for critically engaging the practices of mapping and data-visualization;
2. Provide a basic understanding of tools and techniques needed to reason, design and communicate with geospatial data;
3. Develop students' skill and confidence for visualizing the complex processes, flows, and dependencies unique to the planning discipline.

Prerequisites:
Enrollment in the Urban Planning program