2023 J-Term Courses
Feminist Urban Planning, Natalia Dopazo
CANCELED – Urban ethnographies: techniques to bring territorial counter-narratives in design, Natalia Dopazo
FULL – Creating a Simple Book, Irina Gorstein
FULL – Gardens/Archives/Stories: Plants in Place, Thaisa Way
CANCELED – Representationalism: Animating Architectural Taxidermies, Kian Hosseinnia
Ephemeral Architecture: learning to design through making, Manuel Bouzas
Postcards from Around the World, Robin Albrecht
(Counter)Mapping Realities, Areti Kotsoni
Color Fields: Painting Place, Uncovering Chromatic Histories and Futures, Yasmine El Alaoui El Abdallaoui
OffCUT(s), Marya Demetra Kanakis and CoCo Tin
Dynamic Mutations GSD V7.0, Pedro Venegas-Rodríguez and Carlos Navarro
CANCELED – Why did I draw that? Construction Document Philosophy, Marcel Merwin
Hauntings of the Suburb: Constructing the American Dream in Cinema, Marcel Merwin
Climate Positive Design Workshop, Pamela Conrad
Legal Design, Marco Imperiale
CANCELED – The Future of Architectural Education, Dr. Kendall A. Nicholson
Applied ArcGIS Pro 3, Bruce Boucek
The Urban Process Under Capitalism: histories, theories, methodologies, William Conroy
Navigating the Politics of Design, Claudia Dobles
CANCELED – ObλiquE rEalities, Areti Kotsoni and Christina Strantzali
CANCELED –Questioning Pedagogy: alternative modes of design-oriented pedagogies, Sonya Falkovskaia
CANCELED – Memorabilia in the Public Domain, Enrique Cavelier
Design Learning, Ramzi Naja
Doing More with 3d Printing and Laser Cutting, Harris Rosenblum
Notetaking Strategies, Alison Pasinella and Nicole Santiago
Academic Reading Skills, Alison Pasinella and Nicole Santiago
Collaborating with Artificial Intelligence: Art, Ethics, & Play, Sarah Newman and Juliana Castro Varon
CANCELED – On + Of Site, Angel Escobar-Rodas and Ernesto Carvajal
The Business of Design, Aishwarya Sreenivas
Designing Narratives, Supriya Ambwani
CANCELED – Data in Design, AI for Urban Data and Visualization, Namju Lee
CANCELED – Sense and Sensibility, Elsa MH Maki and Justin Booz
Practical Tools and Theory for Designing Ecological Landscapes, Rebecca McMackin
FULL – How to get capital for your idea?, Jeronimo Beccar and Saad Rajan
Bespoke: Personal Branding & Social Media Marketing Fundamentals for Design Entrepreneurship, Tosin Odugbemi
CANCELED – Spanglish URBAN DICTIONARY: Indexing hybrid vocabulary to Expand Spatial Design Meaning, Laura Janka and Paola Aguirre
Architectural Objects and their Subjects: Reverse Perspective, Engaged Autonomy, and the Doppler Effect, Sarah Whiting, Volkmar Mühleis, and Wim Goes
CANCELED – To Draw: A Revolution, Layal Merhi
Creating Products for a Circular Economy: A Design Journey with Naya Studio, Jimmy Pan, Saad Rajan, Vivek HV, and Vashvi Shah
The Psychogeography of Remy, Sonia Sobrino Ralston
CANCELED – Assembling Reflective Habits with an Elm Tree, Sakiko Isomichi and Flora Klein,
Turning Civil Discourse into Civic Action: Developing Real Estate Assets for Social Good, Derwin Sisnett
FULL – Digitally Fabric-ating Architectural Textiles in CLO3D, Ian Erickson and Nicky Rhodes
Model Your Favorite House, Weichen Wang and Jon Gregurick
Towards a City: Entrepreneurship in Real Estate, Alberto Kritzler
Geology for Designers, Mélanie Louterbach and Hana Cohn
CANCELED – Possible Architectures for a Contemporary Void, Dhruv Mehta
CANCELED –Painterly Computation: Using User Experience (UX) and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) as Super-tools for Art, Design and Creative Expression, Vishal Vaidhyanathan, Ibrahim Ibrahim, and Kenny Kim
An Introduction to Facade Systems, Royce Perez
What is the ‘Middle East’, Hamees Gabr
The Architecture of Resilience, Hamees Gabr
Courses are added and updated on a daily basis.
Feminist Urban Planning
Instructors: Natalia Dopazo, Loeb ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 50
Which are the scales of urban planning? How can we reframe the city’s agenda from a feminist and decolonial perspective? What does “put life in the center” means when we address our territories? The course aims to bring some of the actual conversations around the territorial agenda of social movements in Latin America and popular feminist thoughts to open new conversations for our disciplines.
| Date: | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 2 – 3:30 pm | 2 – 3:30 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: $20 per student
Urban Ethnographies: techniques to bring territorial counter-narratives in design
Instructors: Natalia Dopazo, Loeb ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment:30
We already know the future agenda of cities has a big focus on marginalized urban communities. We know the climate and justice agenda has to be transversality in our projects. But how can we address all of these realities when we are talking about life experiences that are different from ours? How can we design addressing diversity in a multiscalar and multitemporal frame? Urban ethnography applied to design can be helpful to develop a position in relation to power dynamics and our role as designers. Being able to question our assumptions about what people need, want, desire, and do and also have inputs that can help us broaden our projects. The course proposal is based on three types of dimensions: urban dynamics urban esthetics urban justice The materials that will be given as support are films, texts, and references to internet projects that are developed by non-traditional voices (people identified from feminist or LGBTQ+ communities, working class, or racial diversity). The final outcome of the workshop is a one-page creative production.
| Date: | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 10 am – 12:30 pm | 10 am – 12:30 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: $20 per student
Enrollment: Course Canceled 12/16/2022
Creating a Simple Book
Instructors: Irina Gorstein, Conservator, Frances Loeb Library
Location: Frances Loeb Library Conservation Lab, Gund Hall, L01
Max Enrollment: 6
Weissman Preservation Center offers a two-day workshop on bookmaking for the GSD J-Term. The workshop is limited to 6 participants and will be held at the Frances Loeb Library Conservation Laboratory (Gund Hall, L01) on January 10 – 11, 2023, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM. The seminar will focus on four non-adhesive structures based on historic bindings. The skills learnt during the workshop can be used for creating attractive portfolios and notebooks.
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed |
| Time: | 9 am – 5 pm | 9 am – 5 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
Workshop Full
Gardens/Archives/Stories: Plants in Place
Instructors: Thaisa Way
Location: Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C.
Max Enrollment: 8
This J-Term course will explore how we read histories of designed landscape and place through plants, planting, and gardening. We will explore archives of plants including herbaria, manuscript and printed illustrations, architectural drawings, and works of art in the Dumbarton Oaks collection and elsewhere in the Washington DC region, including the Smithsonian Gardens as well as the National Arboretum and Botanic Garden. Alongside guest speakers, we will consider how plants have been used to shape place, how they serve as elements in the making and transforming the land and how historically they helped express regional, national, social, and religious identities. Discussions will engage questions of horticulture, medicinal use, food production, and ritual alongside those of place design and definition.
Travel to and from DC as well as lodging at Dumbarton Oaks will be provided. Lunch with the community of Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks is offered Monday-Friday.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 5, Thurs | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 12 – 5 pm | 9 am – 5 pm | 9 am – 5 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 9 am – 5 pm | 9 am – 5 pm | 9 am – 5 pm | 9 am – 5 pm | 9 am – 5 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: Meals outside of lunch
Workshop Full
Representationalism: Animating Architectural Taxidermies
Instructor(s): Kian Hosseinnia, M. Arch I ‘24
Location: Gund TBA
Max Enrollment: 12
Representationalism assumes the divisibility of the world into distinct objects with qualities to be represented by the subject through words, drawings, models, and images. The metaphysics of representationalism – which has its genesis in the western tradition of atomism – obscures the primacy of matters, processes, and apparatuses. In short, representationalism flattens the world’s dynamism into static depictions.
The recent shifts in the discipline of architecture have either emphasized the object’s primacy or embraced the production of better representations to address contemporary political issues. This course takes a different route. Instead of emphasizing objects or their representations, we will interrogate the metaphysics of representationalism as the mechanism for the co-production of both objects and representations.
In architecture, representationalism operates in three domains. First, the modern, professionalized figure of the architect is commonly used as a representation of the agents and processes involved in the production of the built environment. The division of labor between those who author buildings and those who construct them is a boundary-making practice that, through producing systemic disinterestedness, allows for the proliferation of the built environment at a scale damaging both the earth’s climate and its populations. Second, the architect’s labor bound to the production of representations as static depictions of buildings as distinct fetishized objects is incapable of capturing the dynamic global process of material circulation and labor that go into their production. Lastly, buildings are often conceptualized as representations themselves – we can think of Ledoux’s speaking architecture and contemporary greenwashing practices.
In all these domains, representationalism misses an understanding of labor processes, networks of material extraction, production, and movement, and the techniques and technologies used by architectural workers to produce the built environment. To politicize the role of architecture in the contemporary moment and to address its role in the production of climate change, inequality, and exploitation is to critique the role of representationalism in shaping the modern discipline.
This course provides the foundations for a critical approach toward representationalism using theoretical tools borrowed from Science and Technology Studies. The goal is to foreground processes instead of objects in architecture.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 11 am – 1 pm | 11 am – 1 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 11 am – 1 pm | 11 am – 1 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Ephemeral Architecture: learning to design through making
Instructor(s): Manuel Bouzas, MDes ‘24
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 12
This project-based seminar will introduce students to the fundamentals of Ephemeral Architecture and its potential to explore radically innovative and experimental ideas within design disciplines. Over the past few decades, this emerging field has contributed to temporary urban transformations by increasing social awareness, activating public spaces, and engaging communities. During the two-week course, we will examine various international study cases in multiple spatial configurations, scales, materials, techniques, structural typologies, and urban contexts.
This is a virtual hands-on course in which students will work by groups (2-3) and will submit a design proposal for a real ephemeral architecture competition located in Spain. The winning proposals will be built in mid-2023. This experience is intended to contribute directly to students’ careers as practitioners. Feedback on each project will be provided in every class. The course is particularly suitable for those who want to understand how artistic installations, pop-up configurations, and temporary urban installations are designed, fabricated, and installed. The instructor will draw upon his professional experience in designing ephemeral architecture projects across different cities in Spain. Guest design critics will be invited to the final review. During the first half of the class, a lecture will explore the following five topics: 01) Public Spaces, 02) Experimental Structures, 03) Material Ecologies, 04) Design-Through-Making, and 05) Ephemeral Footprints. The second half will consist of critical sessions discussing the students’ projects.
Deliverables: Two vertical DIN A2 panels containing all the information required for the proposal, including plans, images, diagrams, models, texts, or any other graphic expression defining the intervention.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 5, Thurs | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 10 – 11:15 am | 10 – 11:15 am | 10 – 11:15 am | 10 – 11:15 am |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon |
| Time: | 10 – 11:15 am |
Prerequisites: Students are encouraged to consider the course’s time limitations and prepare documents in advance for review. By doing so, you will be able to take advantage of this course to its full potential and submit a highly developed proposal on time.
Cost/Materials: N/A
Postcards from Around the World
Instructor(s): Robin Albrecht, M. Arch I ‘25
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 12
In Postcards from Around the World, we create, write, and send postcards to each other. Offered virtually in two sessions and targeted at students outside Cambridge during J-Term, we will re-discover the environments we displaced ourselves into by creating and writing a postcard.
In our first session, students will be introduced to communication through postcards. In this session, students will share where they are and what is around them (spaces, activities, objects, sounds, smells). When attending this session, one should not be at their desk but wherever else one is at that moment in their day: a café, their garden, in a market, on a mountain, or even on a train. After this session, one week of creating (i.e., photographing, sketching, painting, or finding) will be kickstarted.
After one week, the class will reconvene for a second session to share their postcards. Following in-class discussions, students will send their postcard to another class member.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 9 – 10:30 am |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 11, Wed |
| Time: | 9 – 10:30 am |
Prerequisites: Targeted at students outside Cambridge during J-Term.
Cost/Materials: $5 for postcards
(Counter)Mapping Realities
Instructor(s): Areti Kotsoni, MDes ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 14
Maps can both showcase and synthesize reality; they are political tools with influence over socio-spatial decisions. Mapmaking can produce a distorted worldview, juxtaposing disparate knowledge and claims. The process of mapping can be explorative and even propositional.
On the one hand, maps should convey knowledge based on specific data, measurements, representations, and symbols. On the other hand, maps should also include more intuitive and personal understanding accessed through qualitative research such as interviews, bodily experience, psychogeographic experience of a space, and memories. Given this view, maps lack qualities of materiality, the body, whose perspective is included, and whose voice is heard. Finally, maps can illustrate social relations or networks beyond spatial proximity.
In the context above, this workshop presents the first principles of mapping and visualization. In this workshop, we will experiment with the creation of mapping as a way to open the imagination to other possible futures; to offer both criticality and agency in thinking in novel ways. We will approach maps and the mapmaking activity as a situated, experiential, and social practice. Over the workshop, students will learn to embed several (counter)mapping techniques, including their positionality and personal narratives.
| Date: | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 12-2 pm | 12-2 pm | 12-2 pm |
Prerequisites: Suggested but not required knowledge of Adobe Suite and ArcGIS pro. All readings will be uploaded to a shared folder.
Cost/Materials: N/A
Color Fields: Painting Place, Uncovering Chromatic Histories and Futures
Instructor(s): Yasmine El Alaoui El Abdallaoui, M. Arch II ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 20
The scope of this course highlights the tangled histories that exist between pigment, art, land, and architecture. Students will be encouraged to uncover chromatic histories and their intrinsic complexities. The goal of this course is to lead towards a renewed understanding of color–one which enmeshes our perception of space by critically relating color spectrums to its presence, sourcing, cultural ideological context, and use. Together we will challenge the overwhelming disregard for polychromy in space, as well as in representations of place. A variety of practice-based and critical approaches will be encouraged, provided they relate to the languages of painting.
This course is for those seeking to develop a conceptual stance regarding their landscapes of interest—the natural, imagined, built, social, political, or digital—specifically through the lens of color. Landscape painters have conventionally depicted natural scenery, especially where the main subject is in wide view, with its elements arranged coherently. Architects borrow this perspective, centralizing their projects and setting their surrounding contexts as background. We, on the other hand, will foreground diverse environments in our compositions, and reorganize our sceneries to recalibrate elements/information into blocks of color, we will ask ourselves: How has color given meaning to our spaces of interest? How can we disrupt our perceptions of place by isolating a color story as a pin hole for posing larger questions related to material, history, geography, and climate?
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 5, Thurs | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 10 – 12 pm | 10 – 12 pm | 10 – 12 pm | 10 – 12 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
OffCUT(s)
Instructor(s): Marya Demetra Kanakis, MDes ‘23 and CoCo Tin, MDes ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 30
OffCUT(s) is a provocation in designing with forgotten remnants of the construction industry. By bringing new life to offcuts, students will metamorphose these remnants into objects, intervening prior to their imminent fate of ending up in landfills. Internationally, the built environment generates nearly 50% of annual global emissions, and interior finishes can account for up to 50% of a building’s carbon footprint. The course borrows frameworks of circular economies from fashion [see Marrine Serre Autumn/Winter ‘18] and product design [see NikeLab Chicago Re-Creation Center c/o Virgil Abloh] and applies them to architecture.
Building off recent discourses at Harvard Graduate School of Design, this J-term focuses on the scale of an object as a rapid case study. Together we will establish more responsible models of practice in this age of ecological sensitivity and networks of material systems.
This course is separated into three parts
[Part I_Background] Students will be introduced to a range of material reuse endeavors spanning disciplines from history to fashion and product design. Instructors will coordinate lectures among invited guest speakers. Details are to be shared here as guests confirm.
[Part II_Ecological Evaluation] Collectively, we will discuss and agree upon a carbon metric for evaluation and investigate the product’s relationship to design and the environment.
[Part III_Metamorphosis] Instructors will have pre-selected and 3D-scanned a collection of building material offcuts [see Appendix B]. Each student will choose one piece of ‘material’ and design an object within the carbon metric [see Part II]. The output will be digital for the J-Term duration. During the Spring semester, students will have the opportunity to physically construct the piece and potentially showcase it in a group show at Kirkland Gallery.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 10:30 am – 12 pm | 10:30 am – 12 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 10:30 am – 12 pm | 10:30 am – 12 pm |
Prerequisites: Basic 3D modeling in Rhino and rendering skills
Cost/Materials: N/A
Dynamic Mutations GSD V7.0
Instructor(s): Pedro Venegas-Rodríguez and Carlos Navarro, members of DesignMorphine
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: N/A
Dynamic Mutations GSD V7.0 will introduce a set of animated form studies through a dynamic workflow between SideFX Houdini and Maxon Cinema 4D + Redshift. Through nodal design, students will learn how to create models based on procedural and manual work, focusing mostly on the human habitable scale. This workshop will fundamentally introduce the world of SOPs (Geometry Operators) and VOPs (VEX Operators), as well as some basic concepts of VEX that will be taught. Thanks to procedural logic, students will have the possibility to model high-detail and complex objects to iterate, change and mutate freely and non-destructively. Students will gain full control over the models and detail iterations and will learn to work with loops to generate multiple outputs. Furthermore, the workshop will introduce the fundamentals of cross-platform animated geometry using Alembic and VDB exports to work natively in Cinema 4D. Here, students will learn to further inform Houdini-generated geometry by combining the Volume Builder, MoGraph Effector, and X-Particle System with Stable Diffusion AI-generated imagery. As the end goal, students will generate scene compositions leveraging animation tools for growth and physics, and will learn to set Redshift materials, shaders, lighting, and environments for rendering cinematic images and animations.
| Date: | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 12 – 5 pm | 12 – 5 pm | 12 – 5 pm |
Prerequisites:SideFX Houdini Apprentice, Maxon Cinema 4D and Redshift (free and trials with university email addresses)
Cost/Materials: N/A
Why did I draw that? Construction Document Philosophy
Instructor(s): Marcel Merwin, MDes ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 20
The construction document drawing set is the main tangible product that an Architect produces. This set is designed to allow any contractor to construct the building designed and drawn by the architect. What makes a good drawing set? Why are certain drawings included? What drives a section versus a detail versus a plan? These questions seem simple, but they require an understanding of complex systems and philosophical drawing perspectives to understand the full document. This class will investigate construction drawing sets and discuss the whys and why nots of each drawing. In addition to precedent discussions, each participant will have the opportunity to present their own work and as a class work through what is successful, unsuccessful, and necessary for a complete and comprehensive drawing set.
This workshop will help designers interested in practice, offering a look at real, completed projects at different scales, working on fundamental questions for project implementation.
The course is taught by Marcel Merwin AIA, MDes ’23, licensed Architect.
| Date: | Jan. 5, Thurs | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 1 – 2:30 pm | 1 – 2:30 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Hauntings of the Suburb: Constructing the American Dream in Cinema
Instructor(s): Marcel Merwin, MDes ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 12
Blue skies, a white picket fence, red roses. These symbols appear as the entry sequence of David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, depicting the idyll life of the suburban American Dream. Rows of single-family homes and children crossing the street from school fill a scene of dreamy potential, safety, and health. Yet, below the surface lies a darker side, the uncomfortable truths of the Dream. Segregationist policies, racism, and discriminatory practices have long hindered the rights of minorities to participate in the American Dream. Cinema grew alongside the American Dream, providing for many the only medium to portray this constructed reality.
In this workshop, we will watch films that render the American Dream on screen and evaluate the intricacies of media portrayals of an ideology that has shaped major planning developments across the country. Films from different eras will be analyzed and critiqued, with a focus on how filmmakers utilize architecture and scenography to support or critique urban planning and cultural theories of discrimination.
The goal of this workshop is to question and critique cinema’s position in permeating urban planning agendas to the general public, as well as understanding our role as designers in shifting our built landscape. Fear, anxiety, and othering can be created through architecture, and we will attempt to extract how filmmakers take advantage of the formal aspects of design to extend these potentials in the cinematic frame.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 3 – 4:30 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 11, Wed |
| Time: | 3 – 4:30 pm | 3 – 4:30 pm |
Prerequisites: Watch 3 films; TBA at enrollment
Cost/Materials: N/A
Climate Positive Design Workshop
Instructor(s): Pamela Conrad, Loeb ‘23
Location: Loeb Library Collaboration Space 2
Max Enrollment: 12
As the climate and biodiversity crises escalate, our world faces unprecedented times. It is now more critical than ever for designers, planners, and advocates to lead a climate positive response through the built and natural environment. Through a series of workshop modules, learn how to measure and improve the carbon footprint of a site design project. Students will gain an understanding of how to reduce embodied carbon emissions of materials and operations, increase biogenic carbon sequestration through nature-based solutions, and support co-benefits such as biodiversity, equity, human health, and resilience. Strategies will be outlined in daily lectures and followed by hands-on exercises using the Climate Positive Design Pathfinder application: https://climatepositivedesign.com/pathfinder/
The course will be taught by Pamela Conrad, ALSA, PLA, LEED AP, a 2023 Loeb Fellow of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Founder of Climate Positive Design, Architecture 2030 Senior Fellow, ASLA Climate Action Plan Chair, and IFLA Climate Change Working Group Vice-Chair. Materials disseminated will include those recently presented at the UN Climate Conference (COP27) in Sharm-El-Sheikh, Egypt.
Module Structure and Deliverables
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am |
Prerequisites: Must have basic site design knowledge, ability to develop a concept sketch of a site plan and incorporate it into a program that can calculate area takeoffs (AutoCAD, Sketch-Up etc.).
Cost/Materials: Student to bring preferred supplies for developing site plan (drawing utensils, computer with software etc.)
Legal Design
Instructor(s): Marco Imperiale, LL.M. ‘16
Location: Gund 109
Max Enrollment: 30
Legal Design is a discipline for the design of human-centric legal documents, policies, and contracts.
In the last few years, we noticed a constant growth of legal design projects all around the world. From companies to institutions, from law firms to legal departments, there is the common perception that legal design could represent “the next big thing” in order to develop a different relationship with consumers, clients, and citizens.
In the course, the students will learn theoretical and practical foundations of the discipline, taking into account the reasons behind its success, its purpose, and the potential implications for all the stakeholders involved.
The first part of the course will be devoted to the theoretical foundations of legal design, and to its principles. What is legal design? Why legal design thinking is different than design thinking? What does it mean to be a legal designer? During this part of the course, renowned international practitioners will show to the class different ways of conveying legal messages in a clear, and transparent way.
In the second part, students will start to re-design, following the principles and the techniques of legal design, a document that they will choose during the course.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 3 – 5 pm | 3 – 5 pm | 3 – 5 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 3 – 5 pm | 3 – 5 pm | 3 – 5 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
The Future of Architectural Education
Instructor(s): Dr. Kendall A. Nicholson, MDes ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 30
Architectural education has long held a framework that perpetuates inequity and exclusion that is derived from the École des Beaux-Arts. This course will uncover the larger landscape of architectural education in the United States in an effort to build a more equitable pedagogy. It will feature round table discussion by more than 10 educators leading schools of architecture and design. Course topics include teaching practice, course development, understanding the professoriate, and tools for encouraging student autonomy in the design disciplines. Students will discuss current standards of student expectation and will work to collectively chart a new path based on the tools learned in the course.
The class will meet on January 10th and 12th from 3-5pm and course discussion will be supported by reading, video, and audio resources.
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 3-5 pm | 3-5 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Applied ArcGIS Pro 3
Instructor(s): Bruce Boucek, GIS, Data, and Research Librarian
Location: Gund 522
Max Enrollment: 20
This course will provide instruction on practical geographic information system project management and workflows for architects, landscape architects, urban designers and planners, and others hoping to do design work with Esri’s ArcGIS Pro 3 software.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 2-4 pm | 2-4 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 2-4 pm | 2-4 pm | 2-4 pm |
Prerequisites: Familiarity and curiosity with working with data on computers. Have ArcGIS Pro 3.x (Windows only) installed prior to workshop. Instructions here: https://gis.harvard.edu/arcgis-pro
Cost/Materials: N/A
The Urban Process Under Capitalism: histories, theories, methodologies
Instructor(s): William Conroy, PhD ‘25
Location: Gund 318
Max Enrollment: 20
This course provides a critical introduction to the urban process under capitalism. It takes as its point of departure the classic theoretical work of David Harvey – and the literature on capitalist urbanization pioneered by Marxist geographers in the 1970s and 1980s, more broadly – before turning to a host of emergent questions in critical urban theory. This course is specifically aimed at those students that have been exposed to critical – and Marxist – frameworks for urban analysis in their coursework at the GSD, and who desire a more focused engagement with those ideas. At the broadest level, we will ask: what is the relationship between capitalism and urbanization? How might we narrate the history of that relationship? And what epistemological and methodological tenets should ground such an endeavor?
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 3:30 – 5 pm | 3:30 – 5 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 3:30 – 5 pm | 3:30 – 5 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
Navigating the Politics of Design
Instructor(s): Claudia Dobles, Loeb ‘23
Location: 40 Kirkland 1-D
Max Enrollment: N/A
Design, whether in the public space or private practice and the intersection of both its intrinsically embedded in a political context and rotted in political decisions, biases and even politics.
This short course is meant as a provocative brief exploration of the boundaries of Design practice within complex political scenarios. The course acknowledges that the practice of Design stands for a set of values, and by them, it takes a political dimension, moreover when pursuing a social transformation for a more sustainable, equitable future.
The course pursues an introductory approach to analyzing actors and resources that must be identified and understood, as well as the relationship between them, to navigate the planning and design processes.
We will explore the reality of the implementation of public policies and projects, and how technical proposals are permeated by political views, beliefs, and decisions.
Course Contents: The discussion will focus on the following topics.
- Assessing and understanding the Political Landscape of a given project
- Mapping Actors and Resources
- The Distribution of Power
- Articulating differences to create common ground
- Political Risk Assessment
- The Art of the Possible
Course methodology: Seminar format based on readings and case studies with an in-class discussion.
Deliverable: Map the political ecosystem of a project or program and create a political strategy to achieve the expected outcome.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 10 am – 12 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 10 am – 12 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
ObλiquE rEalities
Instructor(s): Areti Kotsoni, MDes ‘22 and Christina Strantzali, MDes ‘22
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 15
ObλiquE rEalities will create a common, constantly shifting pandemic reality for all participants. Daily official rules are expected to be followed aiming to create survival guides and artworks as an archive for potential infected communities in the future. The main workshop goals are to revitalize creativity, strengthen the coherence between perception (through “lógos”) and depiction (through “praxis”), and enhance the feeling of caring for a community.
The participants will be asked to create a narrative of their pandemic day, as partially restricted bo@ flâneu@, in whichever form of dissemination they choose. They are free to work on either one project that navigates through each respective reality (recommended), or multiple ones.
We as tutors will constantly provide feedback through tangible examples and theories of depiction and representation to help in the advancement of the projects. At the end of the workshop, we aim to create a collective platform (e.g., an online diary) to showcase all individual and collective work.
ObλiquE rEalities is an ongoing ever-evolving workshop with slight alterations throughout the years. The aim is to collect a variety of survival guides and store them in the cloud, thus exploring the creative ways humankind adapts to new realities, and sharing them as online infrastructure.
instagram, past edition: @obliquerealities
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed |
| Time: | 9 – 12 am | 9 – 12 am | 3-5 pm |
Prerequisites: Creativity. (And analog and/or digital tools for depiction purposes.)
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Questioning Pedagogy: alternative modes of design-oriented pedagogies
Instructor(s): Sonya Falkovskaia, M. Arch I ‘23
Zoom Link: TBA
Max Enrollment: N/A
This course – divided into three parts – will explore a series of alternative approaches to pedagogy within design education. The course is designed to start us thinking about why we learn the way we do, what is the history of that approach, who it serves, and how should it change. First, we will learn about these alternative approaches. We will learn about The Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (1915-1942), alongside other alternative approaches to pedagogy. It was the first school to award women degrees in Architecture and Landscape Architecture and paved the way for new approaches in pedagogy. Second, we will critique the current status quo of pedagogy. Third, we will generate our own alternative solutions to these critiques via a collective discussion.
Deliverables: Produce 1 diagram/drawing/text following the Tuesday session for collective discussion in the Wednesday session.
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed |
| Time: | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Memorabilia in the Public Domain
Instructor(s): Enrique Cavelier, MLA AP I ’23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 6
In the last decade, the world has experienced an effervescent examination of the fate of monuments in the public domain. This debate has rendered statues into political targets and the spaces around them into areas of civil discussion. From Charlottesville (US) to Bristol (UK) to Cali (Colombia), we have seen how political actors have activated previously invisible objects in the urban landscape.
Despite this renewed activation of monuments, these objects in the public domain have always been surrounded by the mundanity of urban life. How many of us have stopped, driven around, or respited at a monument and have not been bothered to question its existence? Away from special occasions and activations, how much do memorials matter more than benches or stop signs in the public domain?
Starting with Andrew M. Shaken’s “The Everyday Life of Memorials” as a foundation argument, the course aims to explore and discuss the plasticity of memorials in public spaces. Varying from active political spaces of contestation to mere decor of the urban landscape, we will examine the role of memorials in the public domain.
During five days in January, the course will ask us to become fieldworkers to explore, experience, and record a memorial physically. By studying its historical context, physical site, material conditions, spatial relationship, and everydayness- to borrow Shaken’s term- we will debate and question the role each site plays in its specific public setting. Throughout the course, we will learn to create a fieldwork journal, take and examine photographs, record video and sound in public spaces and develop a platform of discussion to share our findings with a general audience.
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Design Learning
Instructor(s): Ramzi Naja, M. Arch ‘16
Location: 40 Kirkland1-D
Max Enrollment: 10
Looking beyond architecture school, this course is an introduction to the world of design-based learning for young minds. Exploring the realm of innovative education through the lens of NuVu’s experience (https://www.nuvuschool.org/), the class will dive into the methods and techniques behind this approach to teaching and learning. Studio themes, research processes, assignments and critique will be covered in an attempt to answer the question: how can design learning equip and empower youth to become future leaders?
The course will include a visit to NuVu: The Innovation School to see this model in action, as well as discussions on the challenges, impacts, and opportunities that this form of learning engages with. Course participants will design a studio brief based on a topic of personal interest, optimized for younger age groups.
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 1 – 3 pm | 1 – 3 pm | 1 – 3 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
Doing More with 3d Printing and Laser Cutting
Instructors: Harris Rosenblum
Location: Gund Hall, FabLab
Max Enrollment: 20
In this project-based course, we will delve into the nuts and bolts of the FabLab’s self-serve digital machines. The goal of this course is for participants to understand 3d printers and laser cutters in a similar way to how they understand an Exacto knife or a jig. Their operation can be broken down into simple steps. By understanding and pressing at how these steps combine into a workflow, we can forge new pipelines that represent our ideas in newer and better ways.
In small groups, participants will focus on one lesser-known workflow for one of the FabLab’s self-serve machines. Areas for probing include, but are not limited to, 3d laser engraving, printed joinery, jig making, multi-material jetting, print in place mechanisms, parametric g-code generation, embossing, and mold-making. For the end of the course students will present an object that employs their technique and will briefly formalize their findings with a couple paragraph write up of their process.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 2:00 – 3:30 pm | 2:00 – 3:30 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 2:00 – 3:30 pm | 2:00 – 3:30 pm |
Prerequisites: FabLab Health and Safety Training
Materials/Cost: Cost for the course is dependent on what participants decide to make. A rough estimate is between $20-$100 tending towards the lower end.
Notetaking Strategies
Instructor(s): Alison Pasinella, Frances Loeb Writing Services Specialist and Nicole Santiago, Frances Loeb Librarian
Location Link: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: n/A
This course will introduce you to various popular systems for capturing, synthesizing, and organizing information. You will learn strategies for recognizing citation-worthy information and practice creating ethical summaries and paraphrases. You will also learn strategies for actively engaging with information to develop your own voice and thesis arguments. Coursework will include peer work and hands-on practice creating paraphrases, summaries, and citations. The course will be led by professional staff from GSD Writing Services.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 1:30 – 2:30 pm | 1:30 – 2:30 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 11, Wed |
| Time: | 1:30 – 2:30 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
Academic Reading Skills
Instructor(s): Alison Pasinella, Frances Loeb Writing Services Specialist and Nicole Santiago, Frances Loeb Librarian
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: N/A
As a student at the GSD, you will perform independent research and complete lengthy reading assignments for your classes. In this course, you’ll learn how to find information efficiently and maximize your understanding and retention. You will practice applying strategies for pre-reading, skimming, scanning, and annotating for situations where time is limited and readings are extensive. You will also learn strategies for extracting essential information from dense and difficult texts. Coursework will include peer work on practice readings and reflections about time management, optimal learning conditions, and which reading strategies work best for you. The course will be led by professional staff from the GSD Writing Services.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 10 – 11:00 am | 10 – 11:00 am |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues |
| Time: | 10 – 11:00 am |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
Collaborating with Artificial Intelligence: Art, Ethics, & Play
Instructor(s): Sarah Newman, Director of Art & Education, metaLAB and Juliana Castro Varon, Fellow, Berkman Klein Center for the Internet and Society
Location: Gund 520
Max Enrollment: 15
This two-day workshop with scholars and creatives from metaLAB at Harvard explores the implications of artificial intelligence systems on our everyday lives and allows students to experiment with contemporary tools that aid creativity. We will discuss a short history of AI, distinguish AI hype from reality, discuss its current applications, and contend with the ethical considerations surrounding its use. We will also create artworks (images, poems, short fiction) that incorporate and critique AI technologies, and we’ll explore how AI can be used to create new forms of entertainment, art, and design.
| Date: | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 2 – 4:30 pm | 2 – 4:30 pm |
Prerequisites: None, though some familiarity with AI or general curiosity and a creative spirit are encouraged!
Cost/Materials: Course materials for the 2-day workshop will be provided; students may optionally choose to pay $10-15 for a monthly subscription to an AI model.
On + Of Site
Instructor(s): Angel Escobar-Rodas, M. Arch II ’23 and Ernesto Carvajal, M. Arch II ’23
Location: Gund TBD
Max Enrollment: 10
“…community designers cannot create a community, they can design physical settings where people can come together and more importantly they can create a process that nurtures the social sense of community” -Randolph T. Hester
Community. Identity. Engagement. These and other terms are overused throughout architectural discourse to describe projects that are implemented in marginalized parts of a city. While these words can evoke a sense of commitment to working with historically underserved groups, they are often used to impose concepts onto—rather than to work collaboratively with—the communities they are meant to serve.
We propose a course anchored around participatory design methods that explores what it means to design in collaboration with communities. Our goal is to learn what designing with communities should entail, the socio-political challenges, and how we can approach and develop relationships with communities with which we want to partner.
In this course, we will learn from practitioners who have successfully worked with communities and from community engagement developers that are in constant contact with the East Boston community. Through a series of talks and a design approach, we will design a public space in East Boston in collaboration with community members.
This course will be divided into three sections.
- Theoretical framework that aims to discuss and analyze collectively concepts like community, culture, and identity.
- A series of talks/discussions with guest speakers who have successfully worked with communities. The speakers come from different cultures and have worked in different areas of the world, but their context where they operate resonate to each practice.
- Site visit to East Boston and East Boston Community Soup Kitchen (EBCSK) to meet with organizers, volunteers, and local community. The aim of this visit is for students to understand through a participatory design process their local needs and later propose a design that can fit their needs and resources.
Deliverables:
- Documentation of site visit and participatory process.
- Collective design proposal for EBCSK
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 12 – 3 pm | 12 – 3 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 12 – 3 pm | 12 – 3 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
The Business of Design
Instructor(s): Aishwarya Sreenivas, MDes ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 20
This course’s objectives are twofold:
- The first is to examine the impact design can have on an organization’s strategy and growth – How can design help the business?
- The second is to identify areas of opportunity that various design industries have to restructure their business model – How can we change the business model within the design industry?
In the first half, we will examine how to deploy design strategy at micro and macro levels for a business. By understanding the drivers and behaviors of our end user base and the underlying motivations of the organization, we will identify the monetary levers that design has the ability to move. Using design principles and behavioral science, we will understand how changes in design have an impact on the economics and a firm’s bottom line in increasingly AI and data driven industries. We will examine four different cases:
Technology: In an age of digital disruption, how can design play a role in delivering seamless experiences to the user and simultaneously improve KPIs?
Retail: What is the direct link between physical store design and layout, the target market psychology and impact on the business? How does this translate into e-commerce?
Social Impact: How do design mental models need to change to create impact at scale?
Real Estate: How can we balance the right legal and economic variables with the conceptual and aesthetic elements?
In the second session, we will use architecture as the primary industry to unveil opportunities to restructure the business model in the built environment space, while preserving the core of the role of the designer.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 11:00 am – 12:30 pm | 11:00 am – 12:30 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 11:00 am – 12:30 pm | 11:00 am – 12:30 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
Designing Narratives
Instructor(s): Supriya Ambwani, MLA I ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 12
Designers tell stories. And stories shape designers. This course views storytelling as the central tool of design.
In addition to architecture and design, we will turn to literature, art, film, and music to coax compelling narratives from the spaces we study and inhabit and enrich our designs with the stories we create and are inspired by. Writing and visual representation are the primary mediums of this course, but we will wander into multiple forms of creative expression.
Course Deliverables: We will workshop at least one design or writing per student and build a framework to continue drawing stories out of designs and site research. Students will produce a narrative or narrative-informed design to share with the class. Their generous criticism and feedback will help illuminate their peers’ work.
Session 1: – Nonexistent Stories in Existing Sites: New Ideas, Old Places [Monday, 9 January 2023]
Many of the cities we research, the buildings we observe, and the landscapes we redesign overflow with richly documented histories. As designers, our challenge is to tell new stories about overstudied places without burying them under clichés and caricatures or ignoring understudied spaces within those places.
How do we tell fresh stories about these storied places? How might we use narratives to uncover old sites and discover designs that furnish our imaginations with vivid possibilities?
This session will invite a wider approach to design and bolster our storytelling skills by engaging with the work of writers and artists who masterfully add new perspectives to extensively researched sites. We will strengthen our design storytelling by integrating visual and non-visual storytelling mediums.
Session 2: – The Imagined Site: Undiscovered and Invented Spaces [Wednesday, 11 January 2023]
Many parts of the universe remain undiscovered, creating avenues for artists, musicians, novelists, and filmmakers to imagine new worlds. Speculative designs on existing sites are inventions meant to encourage us to enrich our realities. We can use inventive forms of storytelling like worldbuilding to tackle perennial issues that designers must address. By exploring faraway spaces, we are forced to creatively address our surroundings. Designers push deeper into the unknown to invent alternative spatial futures.
This session will use techniques like worldbuilding to produce new stories that shape creative designs. We will look at ways to acknowledge the existing stories on a site while communicating the excitement and rationale for creating a novel world.
Session 3: – Designing Your Narratives [Friday, 13 January 2023]
Having understood the rationale and value of storytelling and considered building new worlds that illuminate our immediate ones, how do we craft compelling stories that shape and permeate our designs? The final part of the course will workshop narratives from students’ site-specific designs or writing, showing students how to use close observation and playful imagination to craft narratives.
We will build on precedents from the first two classes to collectively draw out the stories that underlie students’ work. We will examine how to move from curiosity to idea to narrative as we develop narratives and related designs from scattered ideas, works-in-progress, or completed projects in need of revision.
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
Data in Design, AI for Urban Data and Visualization
Instructor(s): Namju Lee, MDes ‘17
Location: Gund TBA
Max Enrollment: 10
This course contains several introductory lectures and hands-on workshops for those who want to use data as design materials to develop the design process.
We will gently visit the basic concepts and implementations of the topics: Code, Data and processing, Geometry data, Vector, Raster, and some machine learning models and their related technologies, such examples: Regression, Classification, Pattern, Data Representation, Dimensionality Reduction, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Implementation, Mapping, and Visualization Methodologies.
From the designer’s perspective, students will better understand and implement the use of data and tools, finally, gain holistic high-level concepts to expand that knowledge and technology further. Therefore, the ideas and contents you will learn in this course could become a map for those who want to learn how to use data and digital media in design.
Each day, students will learn the individual topics listed below. Then, students will make a group to discuss, help, understand, and finish homework and examples. All code and examples will be online, and the instructor will be available before and after class for troubleshooting.
In addition, it is also possible for an individual or group to focus on one of the primary topics and revisit other topics after the course based on the student’s ability and expectations. It is yours if you are interested in data as a design material.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 5, Thurs | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 3 – 5 pm | 3 – 5 pm | 3 – 5 pm | 3 – 5 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon |
| Time: | 3 – 5 pm |
Prerequisites: Experience with one of modern programming languages (Python, Java, Javascript, Typescript, C, C++, C#, or Swift)
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Sense and Sensibility
Instructor(s): Elsa MH Maki, M. Arch I ’23 and Justin Booz, MLA I ‘24
Location: Gund TBA
Max Enrollment: 12
Architectural and landscape models work hard to convey the visible, tactile qualities of space, but when do we get to play with the sounds, the smells, and the tastes? The first meeting of this course will introduce methods for constructing sensory models – Elsa (M.Arch I ‘23) will discuss scent-embedded surfaces and translating smell and taste to visual representation, and Justin (MLA ‘24) will introduce sensor technology and scripting (primarily Grasshopper and Blender). An optional reading list will illustrate aerosol movement, the history of smells in the city, and the roles of scent, sound, and taste in memory. In the following two meetings, we will experiment with techniques and materials based on each participant’s interests, possibly including: perfumed paper/textile models; edible models; filming vapor; or using Grasshopper to visualize sensor data. Each participant will aim to bring a satisfying model to the last meeting.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 1 – 1:40 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 1 – 1:40 pm | 1 – 1:40 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: By participants; could be found/repurposed objects, purchased materials, or a combination of the two.
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Practical Tools and Theory for Designing Ecological Landscapes
Instructor(s): Rebecca McMackin, Loeb ‘23
Location: Gund 318
Max Enrollment: 30
A new study from the WWF shows that global wildlife populations have declined an average of 70% in the last 50 years, while recent research places over a million species at risk of extinction in the near future.
The landscapes we design will either help or hinder these populations. For those of you inclined to help, this course will give you functional tools to do so.
There is now solid research and reliable techniques for designing gardens, parks, campuses, and private landscapes that provide quality habitat for wildlife, allow for populations of rare plants to thrive, while welcoming people.
After managing Brooklyn Bridge Park for more than a decade, I’ve seen many strategies for ecological landscape design succeed and fail. In this course, I’ll pass along actionable tools for designers to create ecologically functional landscapes. From ecoregions to plant placement, soil protections and matrix planting, we’ll cover the strategies that work. Christopher Roddick, head arborist at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden will discuss designing with and around trees.
The first day will cover the importance of ecological design, terminology, and the role of design within ethical and ecological landscape stewardship. The second day we will cover practical tools for landscape design, as well as walk through the process of approaching a new project.
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed |
| Time: | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
How to get capital for your idea?
Instructor(s): Jeronimo Beccar, MDE ’19 and Saad Rajan, MDE ‘19
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 7
Designers can be great entrepreneurs. So many incredible GSD ideas/companies are left on the “studio table” because of the lack of knowledge, connections, and feedback needed for ideas to become mature, scalable, and VC backable. Students seldom know what “boxes” they need to check to get funded or even what to say. We hope to share our experiences, lessons learned, and network so more GSD students can work on their ventures during their summer breaks or right after graduation. We hope that more imaginative GSD ideas can become incredible companies and designers can carry out their visions into the world. Did you know that the co-founder of Pinterest was an architecture grad? Did you know that the CEO of AirBnb was an industrial design grad? The results of this J-term are to have designers build a pitch deck that is investor ready (including possible business models, milestones for turning this into a company, and a vetted idea) and to start building a list of investors that may be aligned with their vision. We have collectively raised almost $10m dollars for our ventures from incredible VC’s and angels including the co-founder of Pinterest, CFO of Figma, and many more. We have learnt the hard way what our ideas didn’t have before they could be venture-backable businesses. We want to share this with GSD students.
Deliverable: investor ready pitch deck
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 10 – 11 am | 10 – 11 am |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 10 – 11 am | 10 – 11 am |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
FULL – Enrollment Link
Bespoke: Personal Branding & Social Media Marketing Fundamentals for Design Entrepreneurship
Instructor(s): Tosin Odugbemi, M. Arch I ‘24
Location: Gund 109
Max Enrollment: 30
In this course, you will learn how to create an artful, authentic, and strategic personal brand and how to market your services on social media.
During the first week, we will walk through the fundamental concepts and verbiage used in branding and marketing, focusing on the ideas most pertinent to design entrepreneurship. In the second week, you will design your own stunning visual brand identity that positions you as an authority and represents your bespoke idiosyncrasies as a creative.
Students will come out of this course with the following:
- A working business purpose statement
- A foundational visual brand identity: logo, color palette, typeface, photography style, and voice
- A clear direction to continue iterating on and expanding your brand identity
- A clear direction on how you can build market awareness using social media
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 12 pm |
Prerequisites: Knowledge of Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop preferred.
Cost/Materials: Optional textbook ($30)
Spanglish URBAN DICTIONARY: Indexing hybrid vocabulary to Expand Spatial Design Meaning
Instructor(s): Laura Janka, MAUD ‘11 and Paola Aguirre, MAUD ‘11
Location: Gund TBD
Max Enrollment: 20
In the city of Boston, 29% of our population is foreign-born (2019 American Community Survey (PUMS), BPDA Research Division Analysis) and 28% of them are Hispanic/Latinx, the same population that are among the groups with the greatest rate of poverty. Still understood as minorities, most of these people’s experiences and needs for a better urban life are under or misrepresented. How can language help us expand design vocabulary to explore multiple ways of interaction and connection with our international communities?
Based on the methodology used by the ABCDMXYZ project and Diccionario de las Periferias, students in this course will learn to apply a lexicon framework and develop a tool to embrace spatial experiences that are foreign to our sight and design. Organized in an alphabetical manner (or not), these new concepts shall inform and lead to an expanded vocabulary.
The course is organized in a three-day workshop and will include a combination of short discussions and will concentrate on active learning group exercises using contextual qualitative and quantitative data and narratives to read space, index experiences, define and reorganize Spanglish concepts in need for an inclusive design repertoire and shared conversations.
The course deliverable will be a collective tool in the form of a design index.
Class 1: Why indexing? How to reframe our reading of overlooked spaces?
- Brief overview
- Theoretical background
- Field exercise
Class 2: What are alternative spatial narratives utilized by Hispanic and Latinx communities?
- Spatial definitions
- Word grouping according to spatial or geographic context
- Indexing of words
Class 3: How could language be interlinked and organized? How is this content accessible?
- Collective database
- Building a platform for content sharing
- Understanding the parts
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 9 am– 1 pm | 9 am– 1 pm | 9 am– 1 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: Expenses associated with printing
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Architectural Objects and their Subjects: Reverse Perspective, Engaged Autonomy, and the Doppler Effect
Instructor(s): Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, Harvard GSD; Volkmar Mühleis, LUCA School of Arts, Ghent; and Wim Goes, Dpt. of Architecture, KULeuven
Location: Gund 510
Max Enrollment: 16
This hybrid* course, taught in conjunction with two faculty members from the University of Leuven in Belgium, who will be here in person for the course, provides an opportunity to do a close reading of three architectural concepts and how they might play out in contemporary practice: reverse perspective, engaged autonomy, and the Doppler effect. The course will consist of two sessions devoted to closely reading and discussing these three concepts. These seminar discussions will be led by Professors Whiting and Mühleis (Professors Goes and Mühleis will also briefly present the work that their students did in their Reverse Perspective course last semester). The following two sessions will be focused on examples of how these concepts might play out in design. Working in pairs, the GSD students will present examples of what they understand to be manifestations of these concepts in built work, design projects (their work or others’), or in architectural representation (drawings or models).
* A cohort of up to 25 of students from the LUCA School of the Arts in Belgium will join the course virtually. GSD students are only permitted to zoom in to the class if they are ill.
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 5, Thurs | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 12 – 2p.m. | 12 – 2p.m. | 12 – 2p.m. | 12 – 2p.m. |
Prerequisites: Currently in the M. Arch program or have a previous architecture degree
Cost/Materials: $0-Minimal
To Draw: A Revolution
Instructor(s): Layal Merhi, MDes ‘23
Location: Gund TBD
Max Enrollment: 8
People, flags, soldiers, bullets, tanks, barricades, crowds, tear gas, vendors, food, speakers, chants, journalists, cameras. These are some of the many characters and objects that occupy the space of protest. The complexity is limitless–where do people come from, how do they get there, what do they wear? What tactics are used to disperse crowds, how are reactions timed?
From Occupy Wall Street and Tahrir Square to the October 19 Revolution and Black Lives Matter, every uprising has its principles, qualities, and identity. These movements combine chaos with order, and the two are often hard to parse out, making representation a daunting challenge. The course will look at different techniques and approaches used in the documentation of such movements, and attempt (likely unsuccessfully) to arrive at reliable good practices. Discussions will cite personal experiences, published work, a potential guest speaker and will offer participants the opportunity to present their own work.
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 3 – 4:30 pm | 3 – 4:30 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Creating Products for a Circular Economy: A Design Journey with Naya Studio
Instructor(s): Jimmy Pan (Co-Instructor, MDES ‘20), Saad Rajan (Co-Instructor, MDE ‘19), Vivek HV (Co-Instructor, MDE ‘19), Vashvi Shah (Co-Instructor, UPenn, IPD ‘22)
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 15
Modern society has a problem—excessive consumerism. An insatiable appetite for the ‘latest and greatest’ products paired with the market’s incessant promise for more ‘variety’ can only lead to one type of outcome: waste generation. We live in a world full of “designed” products that are still conceptualized in the antiquated cultural lifestyle of “throwaway living”, which was first coined in the August 1st, 1955, issue of Life magazine and originally portrayed in a positive light.
While some products in the last few decades positively transformed our daily lives, ‘disposability’ and ‘planned obsolescence’ slowly leached into all areas of product design throughout the years. The result is a ‘material’ abundant but ‘meaning’ scarce world, filled with consumer products that lack purpose and soul, which are then catered to those who can afford to buy in excess. Cue, Amazon.
This course will tackle issues of the circular economy through workshops and lectures about product design. Some of the questions that will be asked include:
- What does it mean to design meaningful consumer products with the user in mind?
- How can product design positively impact the communities that are traditionally marginalized by the current systems of consumerism?
- What are the opportunities in interdisciplinary collaboration and how can software bridge people from different communities of thought?
Participants will work individually or with a team on a design brief focused on sustainability, creativity, and inclusivity in mind. Students will work interdisciplinarily through ideation, sketching, modeling, and prototyping. This design process will be supported by Naya, an integrative product development platform. The final deliverable will be a design pitch deck that is ready for award submission.
The course will include a combination of work sessions, lectures, and critiques. The team at Naya studio, along with guest speakers, will guide the product design process in group and 1-on-1 sessions. Students will learn how to use sustainable design strategies to create a user-centered physical product. Pitch sessions will help students refine their design storytelling and presentation skills.
There will be a $100 budget provided, by Naya, to each team for prototyping during the course. The course will culminate in a final showcase, where peers and judges will provide feedback and a select team will be awarded a $500 prize from Naya to create their proof-of-concept product. Critics from the Harvard Innovation Lab, Adidas, and Google will join for these final reviews. The selected team will also be provided support in submitting their project for design awards in Q1 of 2023. The course format is virtual and suited for students interested in entrepreneurship, product design, and innovation.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 1-2 pm | 1-2 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 1 – 3 pm | 1 – 3 pm | 1 – 3 pm |
Prerequisites: Experience with Rhino, Figma, and basic fabrication techniques is beneficial, but not required.
Cost/Materials: N/A
The Psychogeography of Remy
Instructor(s): Sonia Sobrino Ralston, MLA AP ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 16
Catching a glimpse of Remy is something of a rite of passage for the cat-loving frequenters of Gund Hall. Whether he is curled up in a box in the Loeb Library, waiting to be let in from the backyard on a rainy morning, lying on the exhibition displays, or wandering campus and the Cambridge streets beyond, seeing and sometimes petting Remy during his dérive is nothing short of delightful serendipity. Especially given that Remy is famous, it feels like a brush with fame (albeit feline). Despite belonging to a family who lives a mile away, Remy has been claimed as the unofficial mascot of various departments and sites across campus through media—he is the Humanities Cat, a doctoral candidate in judicial science at the law school, and the keeper of Harvard Yard. Remy is inadvertently surveilled through paparazzi posts on Instagram and Facebook, is anthropomorphized through Twitter, and was even once profiled in the Boston Globe. Remy’s story is not unique, however; in universities and libraries globally, library cats appeared long ago as a tool to protect libraries from mice-induced damage, and in the process became beloved and sometimes quasi-celebrity figures. But what are we to make of our relationship to Remy and other library cats like him? How might we aim to better understand Remy, his movements, and our reciprocity with him through our digital and physical acts? What does it mean to be feral or domesticated? And what might this reveal about designing the built environment with interspecies relationships in mind?
This J-Term course, The Psychogeography of Remy, investigates how interspecies relationships are cultivated through media and the built environment with the aim to develop a collectively sensibility to design for and write about interspecies relationships. The course will consist of a background about Remy and developing psychogeographic maps of his activities in and around the Harvard campus. Invited guests who document and design for non-humans will speak on their methods and approaches to interspecies thinking. Finally, the course will conclude with the design of an object for Remy as a way to develop set of practices for engaging with non-human species in design.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 5, Tues | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 12 – 2 pm | 12 – 2 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 10, Tues |
| Time: | 12 – 2 pm | 12 – 2 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
Assembling Reflective Habits with an Elm Tree
Instructor(s): Sakiko Isomichi, MLA I ‘25 and Flora Klein, MLA I ‘25
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 10
This course aims to make reflective habits part of everyday design work. Over the course of four sessions, participants will collectively engage in reflective habit practice, which is grounded in a situate/orient/re-engage framework of reflection. An elm tree located in Harvard Yard will serve as a subject in the development of this discussion-based practice. In each session, students will situate themselves through personal reflection, orient their reflection with the elm tree as a focal point, and finally assemble four ways to engage with the elm tree.
The course is divided into four themes whose scope expands temporally and spatially. Day 1 (“The Elm Tree and Me”) introduces the reflective framework by focusing in on how each course participant engages with the elm tree today. Day 2 (“The Elm Tree and the Human Team”) recognizes the multiplicities of human engagement in the landscape in which the elm tree is located. Day 3 (“The Elm Tree in Place and Space”) explores the positionality of the elm tree within ecosystemic complexity. Day 4 (“Elm Tree Assemblages”) considers the multiplicities of time and perspectives involving the elm tree.
The course will equip students with reflective habits that they can use in their own design work. Students will be asked to prepare for each session by completing assigned readings selected by the instructors. After each session, participants will be asked to contribute a personal expression that will serve as a visual reminder and representation of their own reflective habit practice.
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 5, Thurs | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 10 -11:30 am | 10 -11:30 am | 10 -11:30 am | 10 -11:30 am |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Turning Civil Discourse into Civic Action: Developing Real Estate Assets for Social Good
Instructor(s): Derwin Sisnett, Loeb ’23
Location: Gund 510
Max Enrollment: 10
The demand for workforce and affordable housing far surpasses supply. At the same time, municipalities have a surplus of infrastructure that could be put to better use. How might we reimagine new uses for these assets while addressing the housing shortage? This project-based course will use real-world exemplars to better understand the multiple dimensions of socially oriented real estate development. Students will work in small teams to develop use cases for surplused and underutilized municipal assets, simulating the early planning and development stages developers experience on the way to bringing forth a viable mixed-use project.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
Digitally Fabric-ating Architectural Textiles in CLO3D
Instructor(s): Ian Erickson, M. Arch I ‘25 and Nicky Rhodes, M. Arch I ‘26
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 15
This course will explore the architectural applications of the garment design simulation software CLO3D. There has been a recent wave of building-scale textile and garment projects by offices like Current Interests, d.esk, French 2D, CO-G, etc. The course seeks to build upon this emerging mode of practice through a specific digital workflow optimized for architectural textile explorations. Classes will be organized through a series of technical workshops that teach the basics of the software (sewing, pattern making, pleating, rouching, buttoning, etc.) and apply them to a small cumulative project designing a “skin” for a building or object.
In the last session, the work will be casually reviewed by a group of invited guests on Zoom. After the review, the final work will be compiled as a small risograph printed zine with MIT’s “PPPPress” risograph studio which each student will get a copy of.
Deliverables: 1-3 Renderings (in CLO’s native rendering engine) and exported pattern file
Schedule:
Week 1
- Class 1
- Introduction to precedent work in architectural textiles
- Introduction to the software interface
- Importing/exporting from/to Rhino
- Basic pattern drafting in CLO and/or Rhino
- Assign building or objects to create “skins” around
- Class 2
- Basic sewing techniques
- Basic textile properties customization
Week 2
- Class 1
- Advanced sewing techniques + pinning, zippers, buttons, fasteners
- Review progress
- Class 2
- Work session + Q&A
- Class 3
- Casual review with invited guests to discuss work and findings
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 9-10:30 am | 9-10:30 am |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 13, Fri | |
| Time: | 9-10:30 am | 9-10:30 am | 9-10:30 am |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
FULL – Enrollment Link
Model Your Favorite House
Instructor(s): Weichen Wang, M. Arch I ‘24 and Jon Gregurick, M. Arch I ‘21
Location: Sumner 104
Max Enrollment: 16
The J-term workshop intends to offer advanced model-making training for students. We will investigate how to effectively communicate design intent, spatial quality, and material property through scaled models. The workshop’s objective is to create a fragment model of your favorite house that depicts the project’s character from both inside and out. The model will then be used for photographing to generate interior views.
The workshop also emphasizes integrating digital fabrication in the production process in place of handcraft. We will collectively exploit the GSD fabrication lab’s in-house resources and cover advanced techniques to help you speed up model production time with better quality. CAD software and GSD shop training will be required during the workshop. We hope the topics and techniques we explore during the workshop will inform and inspire your future model design and planning.
A photography session will be incorporated by the end of the workshop, and we will assist you properly documenting the works. We will conclude the workshop with a mini exhibition showcasing your artifacts, models, photo, and visual representations of the original houses you pick. This workshop welcomes all students interested in model making; please review the prerequisite and feel free to contact instructors for any questions.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 1 – 4 pm | 1 – 4 pm | 1 – 4 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 1 – 4 pm | 1 – 4 pm | 1 – 4 pm |
Prerequisites: FabLab Health and Safety Training (Laser cutter, 3D printer, Woodshop) . Basic skills for 3D modeling (Rhino, AutoCAD)
Cost/Materials: Students need to cover their own material cost.
Towards a City: Entrepreneurship in Real Estate
Instructor(s): Alberto Kritzler, Loeb ‘23
Location: Gund 505
Max Enrollment: 20
How do you go from the idea of a building into a built reality, and make it work in today’s city? How do you meet the financial requirements, while respecting the integrity and purpose of a project and its design? How do you present a solid plan to convince investors?
The objective of this course is for you to gain a better understanding about the dynamics and complexities of developing a real estate project. By exploring how to think as a real estate developer – their interests, incentives, and preoccupations that drive their decisions – you will increase your capacity to communicate, negotiate and therefore, design a project that is eventually built.
Often it is developers and their investors who influence city-making decisions. In specific, when it comes to a site, they will typically choose the designer, will influence what you design, and eventually decide whether a project gets built.
Over four days of workshops, this course will walk the journey from idea to reality – going through the physical, market, financial, and stakeholder constraints.
We will explore the creative process of development, using real case studies of adaptive reuse projects situated in Mexico City.
To acquire practical tools, you will study specific components of a business plan, including design of a team and organization, as it relates to developing real estate projects. We will explore the business plan not as a finished product but as an evolving tool used to communicate, negotiate, and build trust to raise funds. Within it, we will share and use a simplified financial model, as a tool to explore risks and rewards, linking financial tradeoffs and design dilemmas, as we face limited resources and varying sets of constraints.
Depending on availability, actual stakeholders from those case studies might participate. Expect to do one hour of additional work, per day of workshop.
Deliverable: draft of business model
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri | |
| Time: | 10:30 am – 12 pm | 10:30 am – 12 pm | 10:30 am – 12 pm | 10:30 am – 12 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
Geology for Designers
Instructor(s): Mélanie Louterbach, MLA ’24 and Hana Cohn, MLA ‘24
Location: Gund 505
Max Enrollment: 15
“Geology for Designers” is a five-day J-Term course that aims to provide design students with basic principles of geology to improve student’s abilities to identify, represent, and work with geological media within the built environment. This course is mainly designed to provide landscape architecture students with basic understanding of geology that will support work in their studio classes. However, we welcome all students interested in understanding better the mineral world and how natural rocks and landforms can be used in the built environment.
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 1-3 pm | 1-3 pm | 1-3 pm | 1-3 pm | 1-3 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
Possible Architectures for a Contemporary Void
Instructor(s): Dhruv Mehta, M. Arch II ‘23
Location: Gund TBA
Max Enrollment: 10
This course is about an unfulfilled void – the void left in some regions of the global south by the disenchantment with the modernist project. A fatigue felt by works generated through “impatient capital” has led to a dizzying array of ill-considered, mannerist and shoddy ‘styles’. India will here act as an example to construct a base to launch discussions about the larger condition of architecture today in regions of aesthetic crisis.
We will look at the contemporary use of material with its internal histories and labor cultures. We will analyze a few formal themes that seem to be coming up in the region – investigate the ghosts left by formalism, the shock generated with the use of new image-making techniques, and briefly deal with the idea of the vernacular and its fetishization.
We will learn about modernists, we will learn about South Asian architecture of the last century, but most of all, we will discuss the crisis of the contemporary in non-occidental locales.
What architecture is appropriate if anything like appropriate-ness can be introduced in the region? What is the resolution in this downward spiral of formal impoverishment and the crass deployment of false romantic narratives? What are the few gems and idiosyncratic architecture proposals in this complex region, and why? In this climate, the works of post-independence architects and their successors strike a deep tone of nostalgia. How can we resist a revival of the concrete utopias or a resurrection of the historicist images of the past? Quite simply, what is the way forward?
Bring your region to the table. Bring your opinion, your prejudice, your sensibility, and your preoccupations. This is a workshop of ideas and a forum for discussion. Indians don’t like white walls. What walls do we offer?
Participants will be asked to create short slide decks of 5 images to pose as provocations for at least one of the classes.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 12 – 2 pm | 12 – 2 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 12 – 2 pm | 12 – 2 pm | 12 – 2 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
Painterly Computation: Using User Experience (UX) and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) as Super-tools for Art, Design and Creative Expression
Instructor(s): Vishal Vaidhyanathan, MDes ’23; Ibrahim Ibrahim, MDes ’23; and Kenny Kim, MDes ‘23
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 12
Creativity is ubiquitously lauded as the pinnacle of human intelligence; something that is near impossible for a machine to replicate. In October 2018, an art piece “Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy”, was sold by Christie’s auction house for $432,500 to an unknown bidder, hundreds of thousands of dollars more than Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein pieces at the same auction. This was supposedly the first auctioned piece of art created by artificial intelligence, produced by the French art collective utilizing a generative adversarial network (GAN). Image generation from text descriptions – as in Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL-E from early 2021 – and even 3D generation from text – as in Dreamfields by Google – is now even said to meet the standards of tests for “general creativity”.
Rapid advances in creative AI engender several questions – is there a shift in creative agency from the designer to the AI? Who’s the creator; the designer, or the AI? What drives the “creativity” or decision making in the outcomes of a creative AI? Does using AI change the “creative design experience” for the designer? How can we enable the designer to take control of the creative agency, while the AI works merely as a medium? Can we innovate in UX to demystify the inner workings of creative AI systems? Can these UX innovations foster new modes of creative ideation and design?
This project-based seminar course juxtaposes the exciting field of UX and the emerging field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) from the vantage point of design and designers. Students develop systematic approaches to using XAI in creative workflows, drawing inspiration from carefully curated case studies from literature and industry. In this week-long course, students are introduced to state-of-the art Creative AI models – like Text to Image/3D Generation, Neural Texturing and Stylization, Inverse Graphics(2D to 3D etc.), and Procedural Scene Generation for AR/VR – and are provided with code-kits to run these models in their own projects. In small groups, students are:
- Expect to run experiments with the provided code-kit of the model of their choice (as it may be relevant to their thesis/studio) and draw a-posteriori conclusions from their experimental outcomes using storytelling methods like data visualization, graphing etc.
- Develop designer-centric UX to interpret these conclusions (AI Super-tools!)
Course Outcome for Students:
- Strong knowledge about state-of-the-art in creative AI
- A comprehensive UX + AI project (or an addition to your thesis/studio)
Students from all backgrounds and domains with a curiosity of AI and Design are strongly encouraged to learn with us.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 10 am – 12 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm | 10 am – 12 pm |
Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of Rhinoceros and Grasshopper; some programming knowledge of Python.
Cost/Materials: N/A
CANCELED – Enrollment Link
An Introduction to Facade Systems
Instructors: Royce Perez, M. Arch I AP ‘17
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 12
As designers we are confronted with the facade on a regular basis. As we progress throughout our career the term “facade” takes on many technical meanings along with specific curtain wall types. This course aims at providing a general understanding of multiple curtain wall assemblies including structural glass facades, stick-built systems, and unitized systems. Unitized curtain walls are typical in the architecture industry.
As an architect and facade consultant with a design and technical background, the course is a balanced approach of not being overly technical but not devoid of real-world considerations. We must go beyond designing surfaces to the understanding of how building envelopes are designed, fabricated, and installed on site. This understanding is meant for the student to enter practice and engage with informed design and material decisions. Beyond the understanding of the functional aspects of unitized curtain walls, we will focus on the materials used within this system; this includes glass, aluminum, stone, terracotta, ¬fiber reinforced polymer (FRP), and their many possible attachments.
The course will begin with a presentation on glass and its design properties. Glass is a constant in each facade system, this lecture will set a foundation for the following lectures. The next three lectures will focus on structural glass facades, stick-built systems, unitized systems, and understanding “rain-screen” systems. The ¬fifth lecture will investigate materials used in unitized curtain walls. The ¬final lecture will focus on the designer’s role in designing facades in an architecture office, visual mock-ups to convey design intent, and embodied carbon within facades.
An optional assignment will be available for those students interested. The application of understanding will be through the production of a 3D facade fragment from a case study list provided. Technical concepts from the lectures will be used in creating the facade fragment. For those students with studio projects, typical plan and section details can be developed with review from the instructor. However, please note that time should be arranged outside of the course to review details.
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 5, Thurs | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 12, Thurs | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am | 9 – 11 am |
Prerequisites: Introduction survey of facade systems. No technical background required.
Cost/Materials: N/A
What is the ‘Middle East’
Instructor(s): Hamees Gabr, MAUD ‘24
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 30
This course aims to discuss the term ‘Middle East,’ its origins, whom it stands to benefit, and who is harmed by its consistent usage. In doing so, we can remove the lens of the western gaze on how these artifacts, histories, and teachings are portrayed and displayed. The course will follow the format of my book What is the ‘Middle East’ covering topics of history, language, origins of the museum, and more. Museums have evolved into non-productive modes of exhibition and more of an expensive method of archival of the physical. In tandem with this book, I have designed a workshop space to un-make the notion of the Middle East portrayed in western media and academia.
Deliverables
Each student is expected to contribute to the conversation and leave their thoughts during the workshop sessions.
Not all meetings mandatory (at least three of your choice)!
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 3, Tues | Jan. 5, Thurs |
| Time: | 4-5 pm | 4-5 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 10, Tues | Jan. 12, Thurs |
| Time: | 4-5 pm | 4-5 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A
The Architecture of Resilience
Instructor(s): Hamees Gabr, MAUD ‘24
Location: Zoom TBA
Max Enrollment: 30
Future Architects of the Middle East (FAME) is an organization dedicated to celebrating historical and modern contributions by MENA and SWANA artists, activists, and architects to the global community, with a focus on the Middle East. Our goal is to shed light on non-European modes of architectural thought and expression and celebrate historical and modern contributions by Middle Eastern artists, activists, and architects to the global community. One way we do so is through our publication Mashrabiya which you can check out on Instagram. Run in correlation with the Future Architects of the Middle East, this course will center around Mashrabiya and this year’s theme- Architecture of Resilience. Each student will use the class time to create a submission to the publication as well as learn the basics of publication curation. While all classes are not mandatory, it is encouraged to join every session in order to receive the most feedback on your submission from your peers as well as support one another. It is mandatory to attend a minimum of three of the sessions.
Not all meetings mandatory (at least three of your choice)!
Week 1
| Date: | Jan. 4, Wed | Jan. 6, Fri |
| Time: | 4-5 pm | 4-5 pm |
Week 2
| Date: | Jan. 9, Mon | Jan. 11, Wed | Jan. 13, Fri |
| Time: | 4-5 pm | 4-5 pm | 4-5 pm |
Prerequisites: N/A
Cost/Materials: N/A