MDes Open Project: Re-imagining the Archive
Working in collaboration with several prominent institutions, this Open Project will engage students in the process and practice of designing and developing data visualizations of these institutions’ archival holdings.
Data visualization is not a neutral exercise in creating and communicating understanding. It need not involve computers. Members of the Open Project will pursue, evaluate and critique rhetorical & aesthetic gestures in the pursuit of knowledge creation through these archives.
Archives are never neutral, complete or perfectly accurate. They are always inscribed by power, history, practice, culture and other factors. Open Project members will investigate these archives through the tools they already have and will be invited to learn new tools and tool-making practices to address questions that arise through the process of making many visualizations over the course of the semester.
The Open Project will provide access to a range of leading designers and curators whose practices and knowledge offer productive models for thinking through these questions. Visits to sites, museums, and/or archives complement the studio work, and a series of guest lecturers, both from the partner organizations and elsewhere will provide their own perspectives.
The Open Project welcomes MDes candidates from across all four Domains (Narratives, Ecologies, Mediums, Publics), and will not require any particular technical baseline other than an ability to make and learn from what’s made. Deliverables from the Open Project will include drawings, sketches, observations and visualizations, as well as more developed and perhaps interactive digital visualizations. Volume of output will be as important as the quality of any “final” works. We will expect to iterate, revise, refine, make and learn from mistakes. We’ll be using visualization not only as a way to answer questions, but as a way to generate new kinds of questions through the process of making. These questions can then be potentially answered in different ways, whether through more visualization or other methods.
Each candidate will visualize some aspect of a different archive / collection involving the built or natural world. The work will be evaluated in their relationship to the creation of knowledge. The idea is not so much to fully represent the whole archive as it is to understand what it means to try to identify salient aspects of representation, gaps, or errors.
We’ll have a series of archives that candidates can work with, in partnership with or with the support of institutional partners. We’ll investigate ways that we can compare archives to one another, and visualizations of archives to one another. At the end we’ll roll the projects up into a book / publication.
Several books and shows will inform the working process of the project. These include Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo, Autographic Design by Dietmar Offenhüber, Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, When We Are No More by Abbey Rumsey, and Gary Hustwit’s new movie about Brian Eno.
MDes Open Project: Experimental Infrastructures
Infrastructure is an encompassing and promiscuous term that has been enjoying a renaissance in design, the social sciences, and public discourse. We are inundated by rhetoric about green infrastructure, social infrastructure, global infrastructure, and so on. Yet, infrastructural work in practice often seems to be more about reinforcing the status quo than about building new connections or enabling new ways of living.
This Open Project is invested in the design of “experimental infrastructures” that can interject new narratives into society. It will proceed by simultaneously engaging in critical studies of physical infrastructure (existing and speculative) and cultivating practices of “infrastructural thinking” — a network-based framework of inquiry into a range of social technologies, including time, money, language, statistical models, algorithms, academic disciplines, and other belief systems of all sorts as world-ordering logics. We will ask how these systems become hidden underground, behind walls, in technical documents, as well as within common sense, the status quo, sunk costs, cultural heritage, and “expertise.” We will, in other words, ask about all things that behave infrastructurally.
The class will start with a survey of critical infrastructure studies, an interdisciplinary approach that questions how various infrastructures have been designed, built, and maintained in ways that reinforce social structures. We will discuss how “infrastructure” is a term with a specific history, though it has come to encompass a wide range of networks, systems, and tools, and we will use this critical historical approach to map out the political life of the concept. After building a theoretical framework that allows us to interrogate infrastructure as a “master narrative” that shapes social relations and as a “second nature” that disciplines landscapes and ecosystems, we will then attempt to reimagine infrastructure as a tool for radical change. What, for example, might an explicitly feminist infrastructure look like? A queer infrastructure? An anticolonial infrastructure? An anti-racist infrastructure? An infrastructure of degrowth? An infrastructure of care? A nonhuman infrastructure? (Etc.)
To engage in this rethinking, it will be necessary to confront the complicity of infrastructure within historical projects of global economic growth, nationalism, urbanization, resource extraction, and other world-making projects positioned as necessary public goods, but which have in practice led to gross injustices and inequalities. Our alternative infrastructures may prove to have dystopian tendencies, as well, and we will grapple with that complexity through individual and shared research throughout the semester.
Final projects may involve individual or collective work. Ideally, we will collaboratively develop projects that respond to each other. The “experimental” orientation of this Open Project also encompasses methodology: we will spend much of the semester talking about research design and knowledge production as sites of intervention.
MDes Open Project: Perception as Agency
This Open Project investigates how emergent technologies manipulate perception and explores their capacity to influence societal and environmental systems. The class challenges students to rethink perception not as passive observation but as an active, malleable process that can shape behavior, culture, and ecological relationships.
Leveraging emergent technologies that blur the lines between real and synthetic, students will interrogate how “hacked” perceptions can reveal unseen societal dynamics and drive positive change.
Through context-specific projects, they will probe questions such as:
• How do synthetic realities shape collective action on environmental issues?
• What role can the altering of perception play in promoting inclusivity or equity in urban environments?
• How can immersive technologies foster deeper ecological awareness?
Outcomes will be in the form of immersive installations, AI-driven responsive systems, environmental simulations, or critical interventions addressing perceptual frameworks. Students will work collaboratively to create hybrid media explorations that reframe the intersection of humans, their environments, and their evolving senses of reality.
MDes Open Project: Metabolic Rift, Shift, & Gift
To capture a range of design research interests, topics, and methods, this Open Project will begin by collectively identifying a set of salient modern metabolic rifts that emerge through design, the legacies of which continue to shape the vertiginous social and environmental inequities of contemporary life. The term “metabolic rift” refers to material and energetic disruptions into human-environment relations. As such, this Open Project work will include material, energetic, historical, ecological, geographic, and political explication of the selected metabolic rifts and their associated metabolic shifts imposed through the take/make/fake/break paradigm of modern design. This explication will include agnotological consideration of what modern design has externalized, ignored, and suppressed in its pedagogies and practices. The future can no longer be a colony of present externalizations and agnotologies. Accordingly, the final stage of analysis and projection in this Open Project will be a focus on metabolic gifts: the regenerative exuberance and reciprocal abundance of terrestrial ecologies that are vital features of both premodern as well as prospects for nonmodern life ahead.
While the eco-metabolic orientation of this Open Project suits students in Ecologies and Mediums, students in Publics and Narratives will enliven the social/political/historical/discursive dimensions of the Open Project. Participants in this Open Project will co-develop responses to the metabolic rift, shift, and gift framework through readings, discussion, research protocols, and public presentation. The course will proceed in three stages: 1. Cognition in the Wild & Media As Method will establish key working concepts and methods (1 week); 2. Metabolic Rift/Shift/Gift will focus on the theoretical and practical framework, while also collectively identifying research foci and content in small teams (5 weeks); 3. Public Projection will refine the design research content and identify the means, formats, and audiences for Open Project outcomes in the remaining weeks. Through a series of structure Protocols, individual student research and production will contribute depth to the collective output of one of four teams, with each team focused on a salient metabolic rift. Each team will develop and design a range of media and artifacts to explicate the Metabolic Rift/Shift/Gift, to be presented in a public domain.
The aim of this Open Project is an inversion of the inequities, iniquities, and injustices that emerge through the abstractions and externalizations celebrated in design pedagogy and practice. The provided framework and methods will help develop design research and outcomes that augment/amplify terrestrial ecology and relations through design, rather than extract and exploit them. In the decades ahead, the obligations and opportunities of a more literal description of what design is, does, and could be suggest a strident departure from the unequal exchanges, environmental load displacements, and underdevelopment paradigms of contemporary design tropes.
MDes Open Project: Forms of Assembly: All Things Considered
“When bodies congregate, move, and speak together, they lay claim to a certain space as public space.” — Judith Butler.
In the public space, we pass by, come together, or not, and continuously inform and form one another. It is a space of appearance, disagreement, liberation, and encounter critical for participatory democracy, freedom, and a just society.
Climate change, global migration, war, threats associated with artificial intelligence, dwindling democracies, and heightened polarization are among the most formidable challenges of our time. These conditions give rise to policies, practices, and spaces of isolation, exclusion, and violence that impact our daily lives everywhere, urging us to envision and enact the formation of a wider assembly.
In “We Have Never Been Modern”, Bruno Latour expands the notion of the assembly beyond the human into a “Parliament of Things” that includes the invisible, unthinkable, unrepresentable nonhuman, objects and semi-objects. He calls for a new constitution that considers all things and their properties, relations, abilities, and groupings. This newly imagined formation of an open ended and ever-expanding assembly of reciprocity and care is not only just, but critical for earthly survival in the time of the Anthropocene.
At the intersection of art, design, activism, theory, and practice, this GSD Open Project seeks to experiment in forms and spaces of assembly and care, imagining otherwise (Lola Olufemi) how all bodies matter and all things are considered as an ever-expanding, entangled collective. It focuses on the articulation of spatial equity and considering the expansion of rights to more than humans, subjects, and things. Design is used here as an agent and agency to activate the potentiality of underused and interstitial public spaces and use various interventions to activate the space of appearance and empower the public(s) imagination.
Students can use a variety of art and design mediums and formats to research, engage with publics, tell stories, and develop strategies throughout the semester. Projects may include performances, exhibitions, large-scale installations, films, publications, symposiums, websites, the creation of critical architectural elements and narratives, or policy recommendations.
The Open Project includes a lecture series, in-class workshops and independent works, where students are asked to identify and define their agency as designers and members of an assembly, where all things are considered. At the end of the semester, we will assemble the projects in a group exhibition and publication.
Preparation of Doctoral Thesis Proposal
Independent study with doctoral advisor to produce a preliminary literature review.
Prerequisite: Enrollment in GSD DDes program.
MDes Open Project: Experimental Infrastructures
Infrastructure is an encompassing and promiscuous term that has been enjoying a renaissance in design, the social sciences, and public discourse. We are inundated by rhetoric about green infrastructure, social infrastructure, global infrastructure, and so on. Yet, infrastructural work in practice often seems to be more about reinforcing the status quo than about building new connections or enabling new ways of living.
This Open Project is invested in the design of “experimental infrastructures” that can interject new narratives into society. It will proceed by simultaneously engaging in critical studies of physical infrastructure (existing and speculative) as well as cultivating practices of “infrastructural thinking” – a network-based framework of inquiry into a range of social technologies, including time, money, language, statistical models, algorithms, academic disciplines, and other belief systems of all sorts as world-ordering logics. We will ask how these systems become hidden underground, behind walls, in technical documents, as well as behind common sense, the status quo, sunk costs, cultural heritage, and “expertise.” We will, in other words, ask about all things that behave infrastructurally.
The class will start with a survey of critical infrastructure studies, an interdisciplinary approach that questions how various infrastructures have been designed, built, and maintained in ways that reinforce social structures. We will discuss how “infrastructure” is a term with a specific history, though it has come to encompass a wide range of networks, systems, and tools, and we will use this critical historical approach to map out the political life of the concept and its expansion. After building a theoretical framework that allows us to interrogate infrastructure as a “master narrative” that shapes social relations and the built environment and as a “second nature” that disciplines landscapes and ecosystems, we will then attempt to reimagine infrastructure as a tool for radical change. What, for example, might an explicitly feminist infrastructure look like? A queer infrastructure? An anticolonial infrastructure? An anti-racist infrastructure? An infrastructure of degrowth? An infrastructure of care? A nonhuman infrastructure? (Etc.)
To engage in this rethinking, it will be necessary to confront the complicity of infrastructure within historical projects of global economic growth, nationalism, urbanization, resource extraction, and other world-making projects positioned as necessary public goods, but which have in practice led to gross injustices and inequalities. Our alternative infrastructures may prove to have dystopian tendencies, as well, and we will grapple with that complexity through individual and shared research throughout the semester.
Final projects may involve individual or collective work, writing and/or design, aimed at theory and/or practice. Ideally, we will collaboratively develop projects that are some combination, whether within individual projects or in projects that respond to each other. However, the “experimental” orientation of this Open Project also encompasses methodology: we will spend much of the semester talking about research design and knowledge production as sites of counterhegemonic thinking and experimentation.
Please see the MDes Open Project Website for more information.
MDes Open Project: Communicating Climate – Representing Risk
In contemporary practice, designers are often called upon to visualize the implications of and potential responses to climate adaptation on behalf of individuals and institutions, communities and cultures. While the representation of alternative and better futures has been central to the history of the design disciplines, the scope and scale of anthropogenic climate change presents unique challenges to the traditional training and skill sets of the design professional. As communities confront the various catastrophes, slow and less so, associated with changing climate, designers are increasingly called upon to communicate with various audiences on a range of topics. These include scientific data or geospatial models, future extreme weather events and their impacts, as well as their implication for public health and safety. Equally, designers are expected to be technically proficient and literate in the languages of various scientific, technical, economic, or political realms while communicating with decision-makers as well as broad public audiences. The representation of risk will be a central preoccupation.
Members of the project will be invited to curate a range of precedents and practices on the representation of risk and communication on climate adaptation from around the world. These comparative precedents and practices will form an archive of sorts from which members of the project will develop their own unique design research projects. This MDes Open Project invites members from all disciplinary and professional backgrounds across all MDes domains. Members of the project will be invited to identify their particular preferred media for design research on communication in relation to climate adaptation. MDes candidates are invited to work through media that they have previous experience or expertise with, or to identify new or emergent media that they have little or no experience with. The project engages with a range of leading designers and thinkers whose practices offer productive models for thinking through these questions. These interventions include lecture presentations, seminar discussions, and workshops on particular media.
As designers and researchers confront the challenges of climate adaptation their work necessarily implicates questions of communication with and between diverse audiences. This MDes Open Project proposes the development of innovative and unique models of communication on a range of topics associated with climate adaptation. These research projects will be developed through a combination of collective research on precedents and best practices across various media, the arts, and design. These include, but are not limited to, narrative storytelling and ethnographic study, time-based media including video and animation, machine learning and artificial intelligence, gaming and virtual or augmented reality, web platforms and apps, cartographic and geospatial modeling, graphic novels and illustration, graphic design and communication design, among other media and modes of communication.
The precedents and best practices informing the work will be drawn from around the world and members of the course are invited to bring their own previous work on the topic of climate adaptation as it relates to the topic of communication. Those precedents and practices will inform the development of individual or collective design research projects in relation to the Office for Urbanization’s ongoing research on climate adaptation on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. The communities of Gloucester, Manchester-by-the Sea, Essex, and Rockport will provide test beds for communication with decision-makers, civic society, and local audiences. Members of the Open Project will be invited to continue this work with research assistantships in the Office for Urbanization over the summer of 2024.
Sarah Page, Research Associate with the Office for Urbanization, will join the teaching team for this Open Project.
Please see the MDes Open Project Website for more information.
MDes Open Project: Revisiting the Space of Appearance, the Implication of the “Self”
In considering the social dimension of space, the designer, (architect, landscape architect, urban designer, artist) is called to engage reality in all its messiness, indeterminacy and complexity, not only as a sensible response to the challenges of continuing to live our contemporary notion of the “good life”, but as an essential premise of action in the world. This messy, complex reality IS the public realm, where people – distinct and equal – exist together.
The Open Project “Revisiting the Space of Appearance and the implication of the Self” represents an homage to the intellectual contributions of George Baird’s The Space of Appearance published in 1995, which builds on Hannah Arendt´s conception of the public realm as the space where “I appear to others as others appear to me.” The performative demand posed by this spatial stage calls on each individual to conjure up their most precious ethical enactment.
As we face the mounting threats to human livelihood posed by climate change and escalating inequality, an ethical insurrection appears to be essential. Disquietingly neutralized by justifications of “the good life”, economic development and even the exercise of freedom, responsibility for these threats is deflected toward abstract concepts including technology, economy, politics, consumption, pleasure-seeking etc. The implication of the self – our own personal agency – remains comfortably at bay.
In this sense, facilitating the enactment of spaces of appearance becomes ever more critical. Baird suggests this would require a different form of practice. He argues that it will not be an altogether conscious commitment, forms will emerge reconstituted in new ways from previous models, as a concatenation of pluralistic heterogeneous public positions. Perforce, projects will surface from existing social and economic energies, with the potential to voice passionate symbolic interpretations, the social meaning of which we will not be able to determine ourselves. No protégé will claim authenticity. “We may say that as architects, we will not be able to see altogether clearly the consequences of these efforts on our own but will be able to rest confident that they will appear clearly and unmistakably to others.” The designer (architect, landscape architect, urban designer, artist) unlearns existing inherited dynamics and becomes an interpreter, someone that enables critical processes “appearing in space”, rather than defining outcomes a priori.
The pertinence of this way of understanding the role of the designer is justified in its potential to encourage people to change their lives. Appearing in an inclusive public space, exercises the “self”. In time he or she becomes a virtuoso in the art of living together, of conviviality, and respect – for their own community, otherness, the environment, the non-human world etc.
This Open Project may interest candidates in all disciplinary backgrounds and MDes domains who are keen on developing alternative practices. The co-curation of an exhibition that unpacks the implications of George Baird´s The Space of Appearance, will serve as a guide for inquiries. Students will present a mock-up of this collective exhibition at the final review and are invited to continue their involvement into its final development and execution.
Please see the MDes Open Project Website for more information.
MDes Open Project: Framing Regenerative Futures
Framing Regenerative Futures is a platform to critically examine contemporary challenges to settlement and society and then, in collective and individual work, to create imaginative concepts that look beyond today’s adaptive solutions to project new structures, strategies, and scenarios. In four one-week workshop-labs, student teams will pose questions and propose future models of landscape ecology, alternative economies, equitable forms of governance, and urban spatial pattern. This will be the basis for individuals or pairs of students to develop their own regenerative design and planning research projects. The work will be collaborative, yet each student will develop their individual voice. Rather than a fixed design project, the work will explore different forms of design research putting forward critical questions and scenarios.
Two overarching ideas are offered for students to challenge, affirm, or further develop: regenerative design and development which seeks to build the capacity of living and mineral systems, and co-evolution which gives equal status to the needs of both the environment and urban development.
In the workshop-labs of Part 1, student teams will produce a research question, a proposition, and an annotated bibliography. In Part 2, students working as individuals or pairs will first develop their own research through stages of Discovery and Framing in which the scope of the work is set out (2 weeks). In Focus, Definition, and Scenarios this work will be refined through the production of an abstract, methodology, and prospective scenarios (3 weeks). In Part 3, Evaluation, Dissemination, and Communication, students will provide critical input for each other, conceive of an effective presentation reflecting the aims of the cohort, and imagine further research (three weeks).
The work may take the form of new hybrid ecologies, experimental socio-economic models, propositions for governance and policy, and urban and landscape spatial design. Framing Regenerative Futures is devised so that the instructor and syllabus lead the first half of the semester. In the second half, course structure may adapt to the direction and needs of the student project work. The collaborative, critically supportive, and self-governing experience of the cohort will build the confidence to experiment.
Please see the MDes Open Project Website for more information.