Advanced Offering in Science and Technology

Computing, Design, Values (at SEAS)

An interdisciplinary introduction to the central frameworks that shape the relationship and application of computation in design. Students undertake theoretical and practical exercises on computational models — rule-based description, shape grammars, learning algorithms — and deepen their understanding of how computation in design intersects with some key issues studied in other fields, including computer science and artificial intelligence, art and architecture, philosophy and linguistics, and perception science. In addition to lectures and assignments, the course includes seminar-style sessions where students cultivate skills in speaking, writing, presenting, and engaging in intellectual debates on selected reading material. The final deliverable is a research-based project in the student’s chosen disciplinary area — architecture, visual and applied arts, engineering design, cultural heritage, or other. 

Prerequisites: Education or professional experience in a design area is highly desirable. Experience with computing is helpful but not required.  
 

This course is offered at SEAS as ES138.

Design Analytics: Predicting Human Spatial Experience

How do we measure human experience in space? Can we predict a design’s impact on human comfort, performance, or preference before it’s built? As environments are increasingly read by machines, through sensors, models, and predictive algorithms, designers need new ways to observe, analyze, and evaluate human spatial experience. Understanding where human and machine perceptions converge and diverge is essential to rethinking spatial experience and design.

Drawing from concepts in architecture, cognitive science, and computer vision, this course explores methods for translating subjective human experience into quantifiable insights. Through lectures, critical readings, and conceptually driven projects, students will investigate human perceptions of scale, depth, attention, and memory, alongside computational techniques such as object detection, classification, and semantic segmentation. These core methods will be complimented with scientific approaches such as eye-tracking and immersive virtual environments, that offer different ways to capture and analyze experience. We will interrogate the limits of both human and computational perspectives and examine what it means to use perception as a design input, an evaluative tool, or even a dataset. Real-world case studies ranging from feedback loops in adaptive buildings to surveillance systems in cities, will ground our discussion of bias, ethics, and the risks of relying on computational technologies to understand and shape environments.

Hands-on experimentation is central to the course. Students will work with pre-trained models and computing tools, learning to collect perceptual survey data, generate visual scores, and apply image-based analysis to explore patterns in human spatial experience. Rather than emphasizing technical development from scratch, the course treats computational systems as design frameworks and materials. Short in-class exercises and two mini take-home assignments will build progressively towards a midterm and final project. The assignments and projects equip students to work critically and creatively at the intersection of human experience, spatial thinking, and emerging technologies.

By the end of the course, students will be able to design, critique, and deploy analytical tools that bridge subjective human experience and objective spatial data, offering new ways to quantify, evaluate, and design environments at the building and urban scales.

There are no prerequisites for the course, and non-GSD students are welcome to attend. Prior programming or image processing experience is welcomed, but not required.

 

Geometries of Management

If business is poetry, then numbers are words and sales presentations, marketing meetings and conferences are the salons and literary collaborations of our time.
     -David Byrne, 2003

Corporate visuals, values, and vocabulary are all over contemporary architectural practice today. “Excellence,” “creativity,” “benchmarking,” “best practices,” “customer satisfaction,” and “metrics” are just a few of the many business words used by architects in client presentations, grant proposals, and mission statements, while excel charts, workflow diagrams, and other measurement focused graphics serve as visual supplements. This seminar considers where, when and how managerial and marketing terms were adopted by architects; explores how and why geometric figures were co-opted by business executives and turned into bullet points, flow charts, and market maps; and traces when and where architects took those business graphics and made them their own. We will read literature from American history, management theory, marketing theory, political theory, and anthropology to apprehend architectural practice from a business perspective. We will interpret images from advertising, architectural practice, graphic and information design to grasp business culture’s fascination with circles, triangles, and squares. And we will adopt the “Business Report” as a genre to communicate our insights and conclusions on the often-indistinguishable practices of architecture and business.

Systems as Spaces of Care

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.

Machine Aesthetics: Transcoding Space Time

The use of generative AI models increasingly involves the reliance on a few black box pretrained and centralized models where design intent is conveyed through language prompts. However, language is an imperfect medium for conveying design and artistic intent especially in the visual arts and architecture. 
Underpinning modern AI is a multitude of techniques borrowed from data science, digital signal processing, information theory, computer graphics …. The machinery of Machine Learning and information theory provides a unified framework for representing, analyzing and synthesizing data, regardless of whether these data map to images, sound, 3d models or something else.

In this course we will explore the creative potential of Machine Learning and Signal Analysis techniques when we treat the environment and the things we create as signals. This year we will focus on the transcoding between temporal and spatial forms, with emphasis on the relationship between audio and three-dimensional geometry.

We will visit certain audio and video analysis techniques including the Fourier transform, various types of spectrogram and ML tools, that will help us extract structure from temporal artifacts. Students will have an opportunity to familiarize with certain concepts behind signal analysis that offer us alternative ways to think about and connect the structure of temporal and spatial objects.

In addition, new will look at several techniques for synthesizing three dimensional objects that are suitable for these types of workflows.

Students will work in small groups to design and produce a three-dimensional object/space/interactive installation or experience, virtual or that represents a temporal object (a piece of music, video, performance, time series data…). The emphasis is on how the structure of one object (geometry, curvature, rhythm …) maps onto another.

The class is structured as a small studio with a series of workshops introducing the tools necessary. No coding knowledge will be required but coding material and technical discussion will be offered to students that are interested and have prior knowledge.

When possible, all material in class / workshops will be given in three different versions, Unity3d (with emphasis on interactivity / real time), Grasshopper (with emphasis on geometric operations), Scripting (for advanced students that want more customization). Students are free to choose the technological framework that matches their project and technical knowledge level.

BioFabrication

Rapid global climate change has lent new urgency to our longstanding interest of growing materials to break the unstainable reality of material extraction, use and landfill. Today’s new buildings can be designed and built to operate without using fossil fuels, without emitting CO2 into the atmosphere, but their construction threatens to remain a growing source of carbon emissions. Can biological materials provide the answer? This seminar will explore biologically derived material systems ranging from plants and plant fibers to fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms. Our focus will be on buildings and consumer products, with consideration of the larger landscape and geographical scale. Through in-class lectures, case studies, and hands-on workshops, students will be exposed to some of the new biomaterials that are being developed at the intersection of material science, biology, and design. Other lectures will trace the impact of these material systems on the climate, explore the landscapes of production and their ecologies. The seminar will explore the embodied impacts of our material world and take a critical look at the production of bio-based materials and their geochemical flows. Students will explore various ways of fabricating prototypes with these biomaterials, seeking to understand how new regimes of real-time sensing may be overlaid onto these methods to gain new insights into the material. Students will be required to develop a term project of their choosing in teams relating to issues raised in the course at any scale – be it new material development, new fabrication processes, the design of a circular material economy, or an investigation into landscapes of production. Students from all GSD departments as well as from across the University are encouraged to enroll.

Digital Material Systems: Ceramics

Digital design and fabrication technologies have become integral to the discourse surrounding contemporary design and architectural practice. The translation from design to realization is mediated by a range of tools and processes whose development is informed over time by material properties, skill, technology, and culture. As a whole, these systems are the vehicle by which design teams, manufacturers, installers, and ultimately users engage the materiality of architecture. Parallel technological developments relating to the way in which things are designed (digital modeling, simulation, generative design, etc.) and the way things are made (automation, computer-controlled equipment including robotics, advanced materials, etc.) have afforded new opportunities and challenges related to the realization of new forms in architecture, part customization, user-centered design, and enhanced building performance.
 
Within this context, this year’s course positions ceramic material systems as a vehicle for exploring applied research methodologies and investigation into the opportunities (and challenges) afforded by digital fabrication techniques. Building on a long-term collaboration with the Harvard Ceramics Studio in Allston, this course will advance strategies for robotics, additive manufacturing, and other computational fabrication technologies.

Ceramics are the first material created by humankind and are produced across scales and applications from the craft-studio to high-volume, automated manufacturing environments. Pleasing to the touch and easily manipulated by hand, it can also be subject to digital technologies and robotic approaches. While ceramic-specific aspects of material design and manipulation will be taught, the emphasis is on understanding ceramics as a microcosm of material research that offers insights which transfer to work with almost any material used in architecture.

Climate Migration

Climate displacement is already a reality, with hundreds of thousands of people internally displaced and others crossing international borders. This will only grow over the coming decades. Climate migration is not new, and it shares many common features with other forms of migration, but in the current moment it presents unique challenges given the pervasiveness of environmental disruption.

We will grapple with this condition in two complementary parts of the seminar. We will explore foundations in the field through readings and discussion of major topics including how the framing of climate migration affects current debates, the spectrum of relocation from immobility to voluntary relocation, whether and how migration serves as adaptation, and planning for receiving communities.

We will put these concepts into practice through a project for the Climigration Network (CN), examining opportunities for Indigenous reclamation of land ownership, stewardship, or management (land back) to serve climate-related relocation. Students will research and synthesize domestic and international case studies of land back and analyze implications for climate migration, in dialogue with CN and experts in the field. For the final project, students will create a professional quality presentation recommending strategic opportunities for land back and relocation which CN and their partners can use as a resource.

Through the two complementary parts of the course, students will have an opportunity to work at the cutting-edge of practice while engaging thoughtfully with the full complexity of underlying climate migration challenges.

At Home and Abroad: Housing in Comparative Perspective

At Home and Abroad examines the diverse approaches to housing across cultural, political, and economic contexts. In a selection of cities across the globe, students will learn from different housing systems, and understand how each one responds to local problems–and sometimes, creates new ones. We will invert the usual lists of best practices, prioritizing traveling policies that move from South to North, and taking lessons from housing actors beyond the usual suspects.  

A unique feature of this course is the opportunity to work in tandem with the New York-based organization the Urban Design Forum. Students will be paired with groups of Forum fellows as they set out to analyze international housing models and extract valuable lessons for addressing New York City’s ongoing housing crisis. What makes New York a good laboratory for this inquiry? The scale of its housing crisis, paired with the relentless attempts at solving it. This provides students an extraordinary chance to apply classroom knowledge to real-world challenges, and connect in real time with practitioners taking those challenges on.  
 
In class, we will divide our time between discussion and action. In addition to our work with the Urban Design Forum, each week, we will debate essential readings in comparative housing studies. We will cover models in affordability, sustainability, governance, and financing. Students will engage with a variety of case studies, policy transfer stories, and theoretical frameworks. They will complete the course with an understanding of how housing solutions are influenced by local, national, and transnational conditions–and how, in turn, they shape the fate of cities. Potential case studies will include housing cooperatives in Uruguay and India, zoning reformers in New Zealand, Japanese aging-in-place strategies, Lebanon’s financialization of urban development, France’s social housing projects, and so on (see syllabus). We will also incorporate examples you choose in each of our sessions. 
 
This class explicitly seeks to include students from across the school’s programs. It is ideal for those interested in urban planning and design, public policy, sociology, environmental planning, and international studies. The course will be a mix of lectures, case discussions, exercises, and student presentations.

By the end of the course a student will be able to:  
1. Develop a comprehensive understanding of global housing systems 
2. Critically analyze and compare housing policies and practices across different regions 
3. Evaluate the role of housing in promoting or hindering social equity, better health outcomes, and environmental justice 
4. Synthesize cross-cultural perspectives to address housing challenges 
5. Collaborate with industry leaders as they engage directly with ongoing efforts to transform New York City’s housing landscape. 
6. Debate whether we can produce a clearly identifiable set of “best practices” given the global diversity of contexts, institutional arrangements, and intractable challenges cities are faced with, which themselves are constantly changing.