Transportation Justice and Equity

The AICP Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct identifies five principles to which people who participate in the planning process should aspire, including that “People who participate in the planning process should work to achieve economic, social and racial equity” and should “[s]eek social justice by identifying and working to expand choice and opportunity for all persons.” How should transportation planners in particular implement this charge? In this project-based course, students will engage with the arguments of moral philosophers including John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and Iris Marion Young to formulate their own definitions of equity and justice that are grounded in their understanding of that scholarship. They will apply those frameworks and definitions to propose plans and frameworks for public engagement and project evaluation for real clients working on current transportation projects in locations across the United States.

Mapping the Region: Cartographic Methods for Place-Based Spatial Theory

Rather than fixed geographies, Regions are spatial constructs shaped by dynamic relationships across multiple urban, rural, and ecological terrains. While planning and design disciplines have often centered urbanization as the dominant force of spatial transformation, this narrow lens obscures the broader systems of labor, land use, and ecosystem services that shape territories beyond the city. Regional theory offers a way to conceptualize these interdependencies, drawing attention to uneven development, extraction, and forms of governance that operate across multiple spatial typologies.

Mapping the Region approaches cartography as a representation method and mode of theoretical inquiry to reveal geographic relations and inform spatial practice. Drawing upon the entangled history of digital cartography, spatial analysis, and practice at the regional scale, this course offers both theoretical foundations and technical geospatial methods for regional definition and inquiry. Using Esri ArcGIS software, students will explore data models, methods of overlay, raster analysis, composite indices, network connectivity, remote sensing fundamentals, and spatial statistics in parallel with concepts of regionalism around infrastructures, climate, landscapes, and social formations.

Over the course of the seminar, students will pursue an independent research project positing a “theory of a region” using the atlas as a rhetorical and representative medium. This is the opportunity to deepen an individual research interest through spatial analysis and cartographic methods, and will culminate in a collectively authored Regional Atlas: a map-driven narrative of spatial form and design futures.
 

Anticipatory Design: Mapping transitions, Designing Legacies

This project-based seminar will explore the concept of “Anticipatory Design” as a form of action-oriented research that identifies transformative and actionable outcomes to guide the implementation of large and complex projects with far-reaching societal, territorial, ecological, and economic impacts.

As a framework for research that supports change, minimizing environmental damage while maximizing benefits for local communities and society at large, it has well-established roots in utopian experiments, particularly at the urban and regional scales that proposed alternatives to the industrial city of the nineteenth century and continued to shape urban life into the twentieth. More recently, Buckminster Fuller’s formulation of an “Anticipatory Design Science” sought systemic alternatives to universal problems, such as reframing housing and settlement as technological systems interlinked with infrastructure and energy that were reproducible and scalable globally. Similarly, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Interrogative Design practice defamiliarizes well-established urban elements, such as public squares, monuments, and institutional buildings, by giving voice and empowering those who are usually marginalized in society through light projections that capture their lived experiences.

Today, Anticipatory Design takes on a broader scope to address the multiple and converging crises of the Anthropocene. It charts the institutional and spatial ecologies at work in a pre-existing ecosystem, which it necessarily interfaces with and, more often than not, causes harm. It approaches the region as a productive landscape, as a natural ecosystem, as biodiversity source, and as a social system in transition, each of which requires the collaborative efforts of multiple agencies and their jurisdictions, scholarly design research, and the needs of local actors to foresee land-use and expansion scenarios, priority investments and infrastructure, and governance arrangements capable of sustaining benefits well into the future.

This seminar will explore the relevance of Anticipatory Design today by situating it within current environmental and social crises, specifically in the context of geopolitical conflicts over energy resources and their control, and how the negative impacts of these conflicts on local communities can be turned into positive outcomes for a long-term future of social sustainability, through economic and environmental gains.

We will use the projected increase in natural gas extraction in Argentine Patagonia as a case study. Set in Patagonia’s Bahía San Antonio–the coastal system of Las Grutas, San Antonio Oeste, and San Antonio Este in Rio Negro, Argentina–we will investigate how an energy-and-logistics boom can be reimagined as a platform for long-term regional development. As the bay emerges as the Atlantic gateway for exports from Vaca Muerta, the world’s second-largest shale gas reserve, the course asks: How can local capacities endure beyond the boom? What strategies can improve quality of life and meet social expectations? How can productive diversification strengthen long-term sustainability? What are the ecological impacts on the coastal ecosystem that is a tourist destination and home to five protected natural areas, including the Valdes Peninsula, a UNESCO Natural World Heritage site?

Forms of Accessibility

This seminar approaches accessibility through a formal lens–examining architectural form as it operates on the threshold of human abilities. Moving beyond prescriptive standards and the notions of acceptable minimums or generous maximums, the seminar aims to expand the understanding of human abilities and their range, while critically investigating the origins and methods through which accessibility standards have been developed.

From these two analytical trajectories, the seminar seeks to map out latent formal projects–a series of case studies developed by students–that connect the disciplinary interests of architecture with the objectives of accessibility.

It explores the reciprocal relationship between form and its receiving senses, and how each threshold condition affects the legibility of the other. Ultimately, the seminar asks: How can we critically engage with and appreciate the unexplored formal projects that emerge and operate at the threshold–the moment when one of our senses reaches its limit?

Depths of the Cloud: Architecture and Data Ecologies in the AI Era

Today, much of architectural drawing is generated in digital environments. In zeros and ones, in what we call the cloud. A space that appears limitless, yet whose possibilities are predetermined long before we trace a line or move a cursor, by the tools that structure it and those who own them.

Like language, which defines the boundaries of what can be expressed, systems of architectural representation shape not only how we interact with the world but also the limits of our imagination. The way an image is constructed determines the world it brings forth. Over recent decades, programs such as CAD, SketchUp, BIM, and Rhino have automated processes of representation, establishing conventions that condition how we design, what we design, and how we build. These tools and their encoded logics have generated distinct aesthetics and architectures. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the increasing accessibility of computational power introduce new paradigms.

AI-assisted drawing is increasingly commonplace in classrooms and offices, opening new spatial conceptions. Yet as it reshapes architectural practice, it also exposes the material and political infrastructures that sustain it. Far from neutral, its outputs embed ideology while binding architecture to planetary processes of extraction that lie at the center of contemporary environmental disputes.

The repercussions of the digital on the analog are palpable in the heat of machines rendering images that dominate architectural production. Behind individual devices lie vast infrastructures of servers consuming electricity, cables spanning oceans, and mines cutting into mountains to extract the minerals essential for digital operations. Each prompt activates data centers that demand immense amounts of energy and, often, potable water for cooling. Maintaining these images (along with their duplicates and backups) keeps servers running and resources flowing.

This seminar combines architectural research with media studies, environmental humanities, and political ecology to examine the “depths” of the cloud: its material foundations and entangled geographies. We will study the architectures of digital infrastructures that underpin both everyday life and architectural practice. We will ask how architecture might engage in their redesign. Drawing on examples such as sovereign and Indigenous clouds, feminist servers, permacomputing imaginaries, and low-tech or feral computation, we will reconsider the relationship between architectural drawing and resolution. Together we will explore aesthetics of incompleteness, low-carbon computation, and community-driven data infrastructures. We will challenge the paradigm of speed and constant connectivity and imagine new rhythms for the digital world–ones that embrace pauses and attunement with the climate.

Through readings, discussions, and case studies (including the tools we use daily) the seminar seeks alternatives to dominant models of the digital space, proposing affirmative ways of inhabiting and operating in the world, digitally and otherwise.

Plant Remains: Representing Disturbance through Digital Media

Plants die. But how often do we see dead plants in digital landscape representation? In the corners of renders and animations, vegetation from digital asset libraries–collections built into tools like V-Ray, Enscape, or Lumion–is typically rendered in a lush climax state. These 3D models operate as an aesthetic shorthand for lush, green, and idealized nature, sanitizing digital landscapes that are modeling futures shaped by collapse and scarcity. What is often missing, however, is the visual language of disturbance that is made legible through the remains of plants and the plants that remain. These absences raise a critical question: what does it mean to design or depict a landscape without death, and what stories are lost when we do? Death in the landscape is not incidental; it is informational. Dead and dying plants index a wide range of causes for landscape change–drought, disease, pollution, invasive species, shifting climates, extraction, or neglect–each embedded in specific sociopolitical and ecological histories. Within scientific collections like herbaria and arboreta, plant remains are collected, catalogued, and preserved for their evidentiary value–though these material archives are also faced with their own forms of loss and disturbance. Botanical collections, living and dead, understand plant remains not as disappearance, but as data that traces of the past and indicates the future.

In this course, we will disturb the digital plant collection. By developing landscape assets that depict mortality and decomposition, we will respond to the technical and conceptual gaps in visualization software that flatten ecological relationships with time, history, and disturbance. By including the remains and plants that remain in our screens–the burnt tree, the felled forest, the withered crop–we will aim to demonstrate complexity, context, and consequence into plant representation by considering their physiological responses to stressors. Using open source 3D scanning and animation software, students will develop representations of plants based on herbarium reference material and live plant specimen to create drawings, 2D and 3D animations. Focusing on plants sited in the northeast, these representations will describe how plants change over the course of their lifecycles and how they respond physiologically to environmental change and stressors, culminating into a final project in a digital medium of the students’ choosing. Course material will be supported by reading on environmental history and theories, lectures, and field trips to local collections, living and dead.

Students are encouraged to experiment: no prior experience with digital animation software is required, just a curiosity and interest in learning more.

Intangible Design: Organizations

Organizations are everywhere, yet their underlying rules and cultures are largely invisible, often complex, and inherently difficult to understand let alone change. This new exploratory course teaches information visualization methods in order to analyze and characterize organizations in the context of specific challenges, with the goal of ultimately strategizing for change.

We are all exposed to multiple organizations, involuntarily or by choice, including but not limited to governmental, educational, religious or corporate organizations, as well as many others. Many organizations are nested within others, with lines blurred and bi-directional forces enacting impact. Burton and Obel defined an organization as “…a social unit of people with a relatively identifiable boundary that is structured and managed to meet a collective goal.” (Burton and Obel, 1984). Organizations are systems with cultures, and their governing forces are mostly intangible. How might information visualizations contribute to deepening a collective understanding of how organizations work?

The core hypothesis of the course is that design as a discipline, with its unique methods, outcomes and cultures, can be leveraged to describe, visualize, understand and ultimately transform complex organizations. To understand this claim more in-depth we will venture on a journey that at times will resemble a studio (albeit without the space and with much lower intensity), at other times will feature workshops and discussions, lectures, or site visits. The course will be a real time experiment, because our ambition will be to leverage a set of methods borrowed from the design disciplines in a context that they were not conceived for. This ‘methodological hacking’ will touch upon a variety of tangentially important fields including systems and organizational theory, organizational behavior, and psychology. These fields will be approached through readings, lectures and guest presentations, always through the lens of design. While theoretical foundations will be emphasized throughout the term this is ultimately a project-based class, which is how the various divergent strands weave together into strategic visualizations of the intangible.

There are numerous potential projects that would be suitable to build related analytical and visualization skills. Given this particular moment in time, our project this year will be Harvard University itself, a highly complex, decentralized organization with unique organizational characteristics at a scale that makes change particularly difficult. Harvard as a procedural and cultural system is being challenged through a range of societal developments, including the rapidly shifting disciplinary fields it seeks to contribute to, and the increasing tension between the University’s decentralized approach and our increasingly connected world. While Harvard is our ‘project site’ the learning outcomes are not dependent on it, as the ‘site’ is interchangeable. Students will learn generalizable approaches and methods suitable to analyzing and characterizing organizations through visual means, to model and visualize these systems, and by doing so advancing theories of change.

There are no prerequisites for the class. The instructor hopes for a group of collaborative students from various disciplines and from inside and outside the GSD. As an experimental seminar students should expect the unexpected, be willing to adopt to change, and enjoy diving into cultures and value systems that are foreign to their own.

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. See the SEAS listing for classroom information. 

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.

 

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.