MDes Open Project: Physical Realms Synthetic Realities

This OP explores the notion of reality and authenticity of experiences in the built environment through the lens of current emergent technologies. By harnessing emergent technologies that blur the boundaries between what’s real and what’s fake, what’s natural and artificial, and what’s material and immaterial, the research questions and the approach of this OP creates a platform for students to challenge conventional notions of the effect of physical environments on social behavior and challenge the prevalence of “authentic” experiences mediated by synthetic and computational realms. Students’ projects will aim to create site-specific immersive journeys at the intersection of reality and simulation, rethinking the evolving relationship between humans and their environments. The students will work in groups and identify specific sites to unpack and explore the social, behavioral, and contextual realities in their narratives and research topics.
 
The research and project outcomes will be hybrid mixed media installations utilizing varied, technologies, AI-driven prototypes responding to real-time stimuli, digital twin narrative experiences, hybrid materiality exploration, virtual reality phenomenological studies, etc.

Please see the MDes Open Project Website for more information.

MDes Open Project: O(perating)S(ystem)1.1

Illumination is hard wired. Lighting networks require electric grids, digital chips, insulated conduit. Material infrastructure allows for immaterial transmission. Illumination blurs a building’s boundaries, creating new thresholds and impossible contiguities.

OS 1.1 will harness the built infrastructure to extend our sensory registers. Students will collaboratively design an operating system: a lighting network driven by air. As mechanical pneumatic inputs are touched and turned, lighting outputs will change and fluctuate. Manipulation of the physical apparatus will direct sensory phenomena along new pathways. A relay of communication will be set in motion. OS1.1 will create a mechanism whose technical dimensions are profoundly social.

OS1.1_1: Infrastructure
Students will conduct an in-depth review of exhibition lighting systems in Gund Hall, the Carpenter Center, and the Harvard Art Museums. Representatives from each institution will share expertise in lighting design; the class will explore how these modular systems intersect with building infrastructure. Peeking into museum plenum spaces, we will gain a first-hand experience of what lies beneath a building’s skin. We will cross reference this embodied exploration of the physical plant with close analysis of reflected ceiling plans and mechanical drawings.

These explorations will be accompanied by a series of presentations on the use of museum infrastructure by artists throughout the 20th and 21st century.

OS1.1_2: Feedback
Turning a handle shifts a pin, lifts a latch, and opens a window. How is this energetic relay felt by the human operator? How do we sense interconnection across a spatial gap? Building upon strategies of conceptual and media art, we will explore how perceptual dissonance heightens awareness of pattern and discontinuity. Tactile experience will be used to probe, understand, and modify how physical interactions shape users’ spatial maps.

The class will design a networked lighting system with an emphasis on sensory linkage between inputs and outputs. Students will prototype linkage systems to query how spatial position, proprioceptive feedback, and temporal modulation impact our experience of cause and effect, thereby shaping our sense of personal and collective agency. These investigations will be accompanied by a review of existing technologies underpinning kinetic networks, such as cable relays and hydraulic systems.

A series of presentations will address how such networks have been embedded in the infrastructure of 20th and 21st century architecture.

OS1.1_3: Luminosity
Students will prototype and design dynamic light fixtures. Each fixture will act as a kinetic module in a larger network of inputs and outputs. Fixtures will connect with the existing building Unistrut system in Gund Hall. Functional prototypes will be iteratively fabricated and tested, with an emphasis on the human energy and gesture required to set the networked system in motion. Tuned prototypes will become an architecturally embedded kinetic relay.

Please see the MDes Open Project Website for more information.

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, and continuously inform and form one another. It is a space of appearance, disagreement, and encounter critical for participatory democracy, freedom, and a just society.

In “We Have Never Been Modern” and the following works, “Down to Earth” and “Critical Zones,” 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.

Climate change, global migration, the imminent possibility of war, threats associated with artificial intelligence, dwindling democracies, and polarization are among the most formidable challenges of our time. These risks and uncertainties have enormous implications for the lives of humans, other species, and our shared planet. They give rise to policies, practices, and spaces of isolation, exclusion, and even violence that impact our daily lives everywhere, urging us to envision and enact the formation of a wider assembly.

At the intersection of art, design, activism, theory, and practice, this open project seeks to investigate and imagine new forms and spaces of assembly where all bodies matter and all things are considered as an ever-expanding, entangled collective while focusing on the articulation of the problematic 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 challenge 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 encompasses a lecture series and in-class workshops. At the end of the semester, we will showcase the projects in a group exhibition.

Please see the MDes Open Project Website for more information.

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: Technology, Trust, and Governance

This Open Project collaboration concentrates on the transformation of democratic institutions and the novel mechanisms of trust building that governments are exploring to address the problem of distrust. Models of governance where institutions respond to a singular public are no longer sufficient as diverse constituents or publics increasingly demand from institutions individualized responsiveness and the explicit articulation of shared values. As a response, democratic institutions are seeking better ways (often through technology) to deeply listen and to respond to the needs of multiple publics, especially those who have been historically excluded. Students will examine trends in technology-augmented listening and decision-making, including “web3” technologies such as blockchain, as well as novel data practices, and artificial intelligence. Students will imagine designs for governance that are inclusive, creative, functional, and sustainable.
 
Research Trajectories include Governance as Medium, Design for Institutional Trust, Activism in Digital Culture, Responsive Media, Play and Experience Design.

MDes Open Project: Revisiting Field Conditions

In surveying landscapes, neighborhoods, and communities, design could greatly benefit from further consideration of how they are recorded. While categorization and reproduction attempt to read a subject, they also risk overly simplifying and misinterpreting it. In his 1975 essay “There are More Things,” the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges famously revindicated the many possibilities any thing inherently contains prior to, but also in spite of, human-assigned meaning. Similarly, in his earlier “On Exactitude in Science,” he pithily exposed the dilemma posed by maps, both celebrating the meticulousness and questioning the usefulness of one whose size coincides point to point with that of the territory. Indeed, unreduced interpretations of fields, as the architect Stan Allen argued, remain conspicuously underexplored arsenals for design. His 1997 essay “From Object to Field” is a call to embrace “the real in all its messiness and unpredictability.” He gripes that architect´s need for control has impoverished the discipline by disengaging it from the complexity and indeterminacy of most every field.

This Open Project revisits the premise of field conditions encompassing not only territory, but also discipline and actors. What is this missing “real” in design? Among other notions it may contain the persistent and irregular energy of behaviors, rituals, events, social groups, transactions, solidarity, times of the day, exclusion, illegality, non-human forces et cetera that affect and layer a place with spatial complexity and which design is distinctly equipped to translate into concrete gestures. Furthermore, consuming the fullness of ‘reality’ is integral to design and represents a force of inventive inquiry at the core of its métier. In order to facilitate ample opportunities to explore the ‘real’, students will go on frequent walks and become “regulars” of a specific neighborhood within the Metropolitan Boston Area. Engaging organizations and locals in conversation, observing daily routines, exploring overlooked spaces, tracing real estate dynamics, spotting conflicts, and identifying misunderstood assumptions are desired outcomes of each visit. Practitioners in diverse urban landscapes will share germane design experiences in collaborative and participatory processes intended to encourage students to pursue collaborative endeavors amongst themselves and with neighbors. In revisiting field conditions, students move into shared creative processes that while inclusive and complex, arrive at expressions that are resourceful, accessible, and relevant to people and the places they inhabit. 

MDes Open Project: Black Counter-Cartographies and The Futures of Time

Black temporalities within zones of extraction are marked by the imposition of delay, which pushes people and spaces outside the regulated, normative modernist temporal schedules and boundaries that structure social life. However, these temporalities are also promiscuous, precisely because the delay locates one in a liminal state of being. This form of temporal transgression, of being out of time (and place), creates a shift in spatial and temporal coordinates that repeatedly disrupt linear time, and hold open the possibility for a reorganization or manipulation of time and the enactment of diverse spatialities and futures in the immediate present.

This open project builds on creative spatial research on counter-cartographies and aesthetics of circulation, extraction and black temporalities and the after-lives of extraction undertaken in African Mobilities – a trans-national design and urbanism platform. Beginning with creative counter-cartographies of extraction presented in a range of visual artists and designers projects, we will explore how speculative research, infrastructures and spatial strategies might serve as “imaginative ruptures” that refuse fixity and singularities, and that can hold space with greater depth, feeling, and complexity.

We will explore the ideas and spatial practices of various artists and designers that point to diverse possibilities for “Making time into space” (Kathryn Yusoff), and that create the possibility of territories and spaces that are “subterraneanly subversive of its surface reality,” and explore whether this can be translated into a range of spatial strategies that might transform zones of precarity, economic and cultural exchange into a viable, liberator public domains.

Key words:
Extraction, Black temporalities, prototypes, speculative futures, remediation

MDes Open Project: Apparatus for Hacking Perception

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing our world today with a lot of indisputable evidence about it. Yet, many people continue to be resistant to engaging with the issue or taking action to address it. This OP will explore different forms of multi-sensory and experiential tools and narratives in shaping and hacking public perception and collective opinions of different aspects of climate change.             
 
The OP will start by unpacking the causes of why the human brain may be resistant to care about such complex and seemingly distant and unrelatable topics. Part of the discussions will be on understanding and exploring cognitive biases and how they can be used favorably to comprehend and care about complex issues.   
 
Part of the class time will be dedicated to looking at different multisensory experiential narratives that engage the audience's senses to convey a complex idea. Also, we will look at successful case studies in various mediums such as video, sound, and spatial interactivity, as well as physical installations that include smell, touch, and taste will be explored. The goal will be developing projects with hybrid forms that reframe our understanding of complex topics and offer more relatable and meaningful ways of connecting and hacking public perception surrounding climate change.    
 
Each student will own a different part of the collective effort, these could be technical and can focus on aspects of visualization, simulation, or design and issue-focused that can range from narrative techniques borrowing from cognitive science to deep diving into aspects of climate change.
 
Everyone is encouraged to contribute to the project in the modality and the capacity of their choice. Depending on the individual projects, the final OP may become one or more installations comprised of a combination of analytic and expressive elements which may take a form of a public exhibition.   
 
This OP is open to all MDes second-year students but particularly encouraged for students interested in experimenting and developing new techniques and technologies for visual and spatial storytelling, environmental and climate change issues, spatial interactivity, cognitive sciences, and the role of narrative and technology in changing public perception. 

MDes Open Project: New Figures of Exodus (Histories and Philosophies of the Designed Present)

As the politics of extraction, exploitation, circulation, and adaptation cast an increasingly large shadow across the design disciplines, this project centers on an historical-philosophical study of the innumerable ways in which design is bound up with the organization and administration of what the historian of science Georges Canguilhem called “the living and its milieu.” Today, our milieu is comprised of dense entanglements of the organic and the inorganic, newly and increasingly migratory in their geographic (and geopolitical)  identity—centripetal agglomerations whose biophysical composition can often be scientifically determined, but whose cultural realities are resistant to the most basic categories of modern thought: natural or cultural (“artificial”); subject or object; human or nonhuman; universal or particular; global or local; interior or exterior; individual or collective; image or experience. All such distinctions evaporate, not only under the weight of novel or modern techniques, but more so because such categories were all too pure all along. Describing and historicizing these entanglements thus requires the development of an inventive philosophical framework, capable of encircling and articulating all those “mass phenomena” that scatter themselves, thick and mundane, across the surface of the earth. Such descriptions form the preconditions for any future politics.

Compounding this theoretical opacity is the fact that the spatial management of material processes at every scale now takes place exclusively within the domain of electronic media. Whether in the form of environmental software, logistical-supply protocols, or socialized images, the living-milieu today is thoroughly and decisively computational. These “real time” systems contain within their own technical structure a specific conception of the relationship between past, present, and future, and can only be grasped against the background of a technical theory of “mediated matter”—one which patiently and systematically dissolves any imagined divisions between representing and intervening.

What does it really mean to describe something as “anthropogenic?” Focusing broadly on the material organization and governance of space within economies, infrastructures, and political systems, this project aims to deploy a diverse set of theoretical and representational methodologies—cartographic, videographic, ethnographic— alongside more orthodox textual scholarship (theoretical and historiographic), in diverse global contexts, grounding analysis in the careful examination of concrete historical situations. In doing so, the project also aims to ask, at a more general, methodological register: what kinds of relationships might history, theory, and philosophy entertain within the design disciplines in the present, specifically within the context of emergent media practices.

Possible topics of study include (among many others): historical-theoretical analyses of specific material processes and their sociocultural realities; the historical and contemporary relationships between various forms of algorithmic management and “computational capitalism,” especially as applied to material and labor processes in design and construction; the rapid intensification of “environmental migrations,” whose socio-ecological and even biophysical specificities escape conventional political frameworks; emerging microeconomies of attention and distraction; histories and theories of environmental automation, and their effects on work and leisure; material histories of designed objects and places; mediatechnical accounts of individuation and identity; etc..

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, and continuously inform and form one another. It is a space of appearance, disagreement, and encounter critical for democracy, freedom, and a just society.
 
In "We Have Never Been Modern", and the following works, "Down to Earth" and "Critical Zones", 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, and care, is not only just, but critical for earthly survival in the time of the Anthropocene.
 
The changing climate, environmental destruction, and uncertainty have immense consequences on human and other species' lives and our shared planet. Among the results of these stresses are expend policies, culture, and spaces of isolation, exclusions, and violence, that further urge us to enact and form an expanded assembly.
 
Students in this Open Project will operate at the intersection of art, design, activism, theory, and practice. They will investigate and imagine new forms and spaces of assembly where all bodies matter and all things are considered as an ever-expanding entangled collective. Students will focus on the articulation of the problematic of spatial equity while regarding the expansion of rights to more than human, subjects, and things. They will use design as an agent and agency to activate the potentiality of underused and interstitial public spaces and use the format of ephemeral interventions, performances, exhibitions, and installations.
 
Projects will need to be situated in specific physical or virtual public space, which includes squares, libraries and parks, but also archives, protocols, policies, constitutions, and all sorts of contracts that expand the "distribution of the sensible" and the social to more than human subjects, and things.
 
Forms of Assembly: All Things Considered includes guest lectures, open workshops, peer-to-peer reviews, assignments, and the production of a collective exhibition and publication.
Outcomes are expected to be dissimilar.
 
Research Trajectories include Activism, Performance, Territory, Space of Conflict, Power and Place, Parliament of Things, More than human, Terrestrial, Collective, Rights, Curation, Installation, Publication