Classes

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the department. Students who wish a letter grade option for their work must register for 4.URG.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the department. Students who wish a letter grade option for their work must register for 4.URG.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the department. Students who wish a letter grade option for their work must register for 4.URG.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the department. Students who wish a letter grade option for their work must register for 4.URG.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the department. Students who wish a letter grade option for their work must register for 4.URG.

How to re-design garbage into a living creature? The workshop introduces a workflow combining hands-on artwork-making and digitalization tools like 3D-scan and AI-generated rigged models.
     
This is a three-day workshop from Jan 10 to 12 (Wed to Fri):

• Day one: Collect or bring the trash you want or unwanted. A tutorial on the 3D-scan tool will be provided.
• Day two: Paper mache techniques. Turn trash into mesh by hand and by scanning.
• Day three: Animate your paper mache with generative AI!

Dates: 4 Mondays from 2 to 6pm, starting January 9th.

Course Overview
In the last decade, computational design paired with digital fabrication technologies have fostered a radical shift from traditional centralized artificial lighting sources towards decentralized systems (e.g. light emitting surfaces). This shift presents a unique design opportunity to further explore the relationship between architecture and light, which potentially leads to a novel perception of space. Exploring such designs, however, poses the challenge of navigating the design opportunities situated at the intersection between current precise means of representation/production and the beauty of irregular naturally grown materials (e.g. wood panels). To address this problem, the workshop introduces data-physicalization, as design method to assist such intricate exploration endeavor that potentially results into space and fabrication informed distributed lighting systems.

Intended Learning Outcomes
In this four week course you will develop your skills in electronic circuitry, in microprocessor and scripting interface with parametric modeling. These skills are applicable towards future research in robotics, kinetic modeling, and VR/ AR. Uniquely we will be studying these methodologies in how they are affected by/ altered/ enhanced natural materials and conversely how these digital/ computation methodologies can shape natural systems. Here instruction will be given by leading researchers and experts from the screen printing industry. Participants will come away with a deeper knowledge and ability of the methodologies and tools used as well as understand conceptually the contemporary and relevant topic of intersecting physical and computational systems. 
 
Short Sessions Summary — full detailed handouts will be provided at each session

• Session 1 (January 9th, from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm) — Contextualization and Conceptualization
  This first session introduces the context of the workshop, which is data-physicalization as emerging design method to enable the digital manufacturing of distributed lighting systems. Additionally, it serves to introduce the design brief which will be incrementally developed throughout the four sessions. The outcome will be a concept, which will evolve throughout the next three sessions.
• Session 2 (January 16th, from 2:00pm to 6:00pm) — Design Space Definition
  This second session is focused on embedding the involved constraints (spatial, material and fabrication) into a design explorer.
• An optional morning session will introduce the CAD agnostic COMPAS framework developed at the NCCR Digital Fabrication, ETH Zurich.
• Session 3 (January 23th, 4:00pm to 6:00pm) — Hands-on Meeting
  This third session serves to refine the concept and solving implementation issues.
• Session 4 (January 30, 2:00pm to 6:00pm) – Final Concept Sharing
  This last session consists of presenting and discussing the developed concept.

Optional Gatherings will be offered on Fridays to refine concepts and solve computational design and prototyping issues.
 
Assessment
The workshop will not be graded, however, if you are interested in achieving a relevant outcome, for example an entry for your C.V. or an object, we encourage you to attend all sessions, actively participate in discussions, present and document your work, as well as prototype your concept.

If you are interested, please let us know and we will confirm your enrollment asap.

Feel free to reach out if it needs further clarification or you have suggestions.
 

One week workshop aimed at working through the various methods to go from a two-dimensional drawing to a three-dimensional drawing, by hand. The workshop will specifically work through Axonometric and Isometric projections as well as 1, 2, and 3 point constructed linear perspectives. Supplies will be provided but feel free to bring your favorite pencil and/or ruling device!

Sign up by January 8, 2024.

How to create art with DNA origami technology, from design through manufacturing to imaging with atomic force microscopy. Students will learn aesthetics and think through critical and speculative design approaches about the cultural impacts of this emerging technology.

The workshop participants should bring their laptops as we will be conducting hands-on exercises that require a computer.

Undergraduates welcome.

Please email Matej Vakula at matej@mit.edu for more information or to sign up.

The workshop, 'Setting the Table — Representing HER' spans three weeks and focuses on equipping students with the necessary tools to create a zine booklet featured at the Shift+W Represent HER - The Female Architect exhibit in the Keller Gallery next spring.
During our initial week, we'll engage in exercises centered on table conversations and research techniques. Moving into the second week, we would delve into various forms of representation, aiding students in expressing their intentions and motivations. In our third week, participants will gain design skills to craft a visually captivating zine showcasing their thorough research and visual work.
The workshop explores how gender diversity influences design by examining the interplay between female architectural representation and broader societal implications.

Register here

This class is about making maps across scales. To the cartographers, maps are never neutral. It gives rise to decision-making that are first and foremost political—to  include, to exclude, to highlight, to hide away—which speaks to  a desired audience that is specific, if not social and cultural. That is to say that making maps is also about mapping space and  time.

Every session, we will explore a specific way of representing maps—the map of bodies, communities, cities, systems, territories, wars, and invisible traces to the globe. Students will be able to learn modes of illustrating and plotting maps, basics of GIS (in this case QGIS, but we could also talk about ArcGIS if desired), workflows between 2D and 3D representation of terrains, urban fabrics, data visualizations through illustrator and rhino, that could later compile into an atlas of drawings.

The class will run 3 hours, with the first 1 to 1.5 hours dedicated to theories and case studies of mapping and the second 1 to 1.5 hours dedicated to specific technical workshops. The  format is also flexible depending on the class size and the  students' desires.

While there is no specific "final output" for this course, it  would be great if everyone know what kinds of atlas/maps/drawings or skills they would expect the course to teach them as  an initial survey.

The class syllabus will be uploaded here in mid-December.

Limited to 8 — sign up here

This is a 5-day design workshop that focuses on designing board games. It introduces how board games help raise awareness, propose interventions, and resist social and cultural issues through their playfulness. Participants will play, discuss and design board games in groups. At the end of the workshop, every participant will leave the room with an understanding of basic board game design logic, how to incorporate social and cultural elements into the design, and, more importantly, a board game prototype in hand!

We highly encourage you to work in groups in this workshop!

Limited to 15, thus sign up required at https://forms.gle/DbsNRbyG5WnR2fMN8. Please contact Doris Duanmu with any questions. 

Materials fee of no more than $30.

Introduces algorithmic aspects of computer-aided design. The workshop explores applications of fundamental computer algorithms and data structures in the realm of 3D modeling, encourages hands-on practices, and guides participants through the art of generative sculpting. Topics include computational geometry, recursion, graph theory, etc. with tutorials of implementation in Rhino and Grasshopper.

Students should bring a laptop to all sessions

Register here

Note: room is now E15-341

This two-day IAP workshop will explore the aesthetic dimensions of microfluidics and biotechnology. It will focus on creating interactive artworks highlighting the intersection of science and art through microfluidic technologies, including various lab-on-a-chip devices. Participants will prototype works that explore the cultural and visual implications of lab automation and biotechnological advancements, highlighting their aesthetic significance.

ACT lecturer Matej Vakula and Dr. Mehdi Salek, the lead instructor for MIT’s New Engineering Education Transformation Program, will lead the workshop.

Undergraduates welcome.

Please email Matej Vakula at matej@mit.edu for more information or to sign up.

This workshop introduces students to the process of biocementing with microbes. Today, the production of cement for concrete accounts for 8% of global CO2 emissions. Microbially Induced Calcium Carbonate Precipitation (MICP) is a promising biocement alternative. The process makes use of microbes to catalyze calcium carbonate crystals that can bind aggregate together.
In this workshop, you will learn lab protocols for using the bacteria to biocement aggregate including cultivating the microbe, preparing solutions to induce crystal formation, and biocementing loose aggregate. We will test different experimental parameters to characterize and optimize the process as well as 3d printing custom designs to make your own fun biocemented sample!

Contact instructor to sign up.

In an era of expanding climatic concerns, cities are facing pressures to plan and implement ways to alleviate the consequences of heat exposure. Rapidly increasing temperatures and heat waves are becoming more prevalent worldwide, putting strain on city inhabitants and resources. In the US alone, the frequency of heat waves has increased from an average of two heat waves per year during the 1960s to six per year during the 2010s and 2020s. In more vulnerable contexts, rapid urbanization will amplify the projected air temperature change, resulting in increasingly warming conditions in dense urban settings. At the core of this issue is an alteration of microclimate conditions, an increased use of cooling energy in buildings and in its most extreme form, a threat to occupant health and mortality. The climate imperative hence has drawn focus to the built environment, as it is particularly susceptible to those changes and in turn has a strong impact on urban heat flows in both indoor and outdoor environments. The challenge then becomes to conceptualize new approaches to measure the effect of heightening heat levels and formulate integrated solutions that are sensitive to the scales of both indoor and outdoor environments. 

This class explores the linkages (under the lens of measurements and solutions) between scales, from the component, to the building and the urban level. Expanding the system boundary is key to arriving at more holistic outcomes that are rooted in finding long-term resilient strategies. The contents presented in this course will provide students the necessary tools to tackle such questions as:

• What data can be made available to help building practitioners and urban planners develop more effective solutions?
• How do we define thermal comfort and how does that inform the strategies we formulate to reach thermally resilient design?
• In light of the expectation of space cooling demand to triple by 2050, how can we design buildings and urban environments that lessen the reliability on active cooling modes?.
• How do we build climate-resilient cities with minimal material impact? What are the compromises between urbanization and low-energy urban cooling strategies?

Course Format: 

Introduction to the indoor and outdoor implications of heat in the built environment will be covered. Students develop the first intuition for the multi-faceted aspects of the problem and critically analyze heat assessment methods and strategies for intervention. During morning sessions, a series of lectures and concept-based short discussions strengthen the engagement with each of the four main topics presented in a 4-step framework (Designing across scales, Leveraging data, Measuring impact and Framing action). In the afternoon, a combination of hands-on group exercises and discussions present the technical challenges of assessing the impact of heat at each scale and the formulation of design solutions.
 

This workshop is a study on the prolonged human damage incurred by construction workers building the things we design. We will be looking towards the relationship between architects and the folk who build our proposals and how our choices directly affect their long-term physical health. This understanding will be developed through studying three common construction materials (timber, steel, and concrete), the current methods we use to construct, and how those methods to materials over time break down the body. This workshop will push us to consider new means of construction and sequencing to care for the long-term health of the makers of our built environment.

Students should contact instructor by January 1, 2023 to sign-up (and add any specific topics within the framework they’d be interested in exploring).

This course explores the concept of resilient aging in the built environment, addressing two interconnected dimensions: the aging of people and the aging of cities and buildings that no longer meet contemporary needs. By reframing aging as both a challenge and an opportunity, the course examines strategies to understand, intervene in, and transform the built environment to better support evolving societal needs. Rather than relying solely on top-down design and planning approaches, this class emphasizes bottom-up interventions and participatory design methods to understand and engage vulnerable populations. The course approaches aging through three interrelated topics: the adaptive reuse and activation of aging urban infrastructure, the retrofitting of aging suburbs through innovative housing and real estate models, and the application of advanced urban technologies to analyze and understand resident behavior in aging and informal settlements. These topics aim to provide students with the knowledge and tools to reimagine the built environment, fostering resilience and equity for aging populations and the spaces they inhabit. The first half of each session will be lectures, providing foundational knowledge and sharing related research works, while the second half will be dedicated to discussions, allowing students to engage with the materials and collaborate on the topics.

Advance sign-up required by 1/15/2025

Sites are often represented as static, empty plots of land. In reality, every site is an environment—an interconnected system shaped by ecological, cultural, and material relationships. These environments extend vertically into the sky, horizontally through soil and ecosystems, and inward to unseen processes such as microorganisms and material histories. How can experimental drawing and representation techniques reveal these complexities and reshape the way we design? 

This workshop invites participants to reimagine sites as living systems and engage in collaborative design practices. Focusing on a local, seemingly vacant lot, we will investigate the site’s temporal and spatial dynamics—tracing its layers of interaction and exploring how elements and materials influence its identity. By reframing traditional notions of scale and boundaries, we will uncover the opportunities of co-authorship amongst the environments, forces and creatures. 

The Wiesner Gallery will act as a hub for both a workshop and exhibition space. Each day, participants will gather in the gallery to experiment with prototypes, drawings, and multimedia techniques. Collaboration and play will guide the approach, creating an open and exploratory environment where games facilitate dialogue and negotiation. This collective exploration will reveal the site’s interconnected urban and architectural layers from the perspectives of diverse actors. The workshop will culminate in a public exhibition at the end of January, showcasing our collective discoveries.

The workshop will take place daily at the Wiesner Gallery at MIT. It will culminate in an exhibition, likely Jan-31-Feb 2. Students should bring their laptops to all sessions.

Telltales of Tide and Terra is a participatory art project addressing the climate crisis through collaborative art making, public data visualization, and installations, which include shading structures and giant community meals. Upcycled textiles and its patterns transform complex climate data into accessible, emotionally engaging visual experiences that inspire climate action. The project is produced though collaborative screen printing and cyanotype workshops, for an exhibition at the MIT Art Festival (March 1-16, 2025) and the Venice Biennale of Architecture (May '25).

Register by 1/20/2025 by emailing Merve Akdogan.

Advance sign-up required by 1/15/2025 — contact instructor.

The workshop focuses on grammar-based structural design space exploration and the realization of bespoke design solutions through small scale models. Grammar-based structural design is implemented in a computational framework within a fully functional Rhinoceros 3D Grasshopper plugin named Libra (available on food4rhino). The tool enables the semi-automated generation of diverse, reticulated conceptual structures within predefined design domains and load conditions, all without requiring knowledge of structural mechanics. It offers a user-friendly, intuitive workflow that helps designers understand how force flows influence structural form.

Students must bring laptop to class with Rhino 8 installed.

Technology is vital for local governments to deliver services. But when technologists "move fast and break things" in the public sector, systems fail and people suffer. Governments must responsibly innovate and integrate ideas from the private sector, while safeguarding the public interest. This seminar examines how local governments and the tech sector can collaborate to best serve their short and long-term shared goals.

Design is a process to reach consensus. In this hybrid workshop-seminar, we will explore the core mindsets and techniques for modeling, simulating, and analyzing collaborative decision-making in conceptual or real-world design challenges. Students are encouraged to bring their own case studies and perspectives on any design topic. We will introduce a mindset of modeling and simulation, cover beginner-friendly technical topics including operation research, (algorithmic) game theory, system dynamics, and multi-AI agent learning. We will be focusing on leveraging your designer mindset, not jargon, so no prior technical experience is required.

Hybrid class, in-person attendance is welcomed! Students should bring laptop. Time negotiable under survey.

Sign up by December 20, 2024 by emailing Lina Bondarenko.

SSS is a workshop for the development of improvisational movements that survey sloped landscapes, negotiate with public infrastructures, and activate architectural sites. Inspired by dancer Anna Halprin’s Experiments in the Environment, we will practice foundational intuitive physical exercises and hand-drawing scores that recalibrate our notions of time and space. We will explore the historical relationship between urban design, choreography, and gravity, interrogating the persistence of horizontal surfaces and two dimensional representations in a tilted multi-dimensional world. By traveling locally on field trips to public parks and cultural sites, we will test a spatial practice for place-based learning inspired by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP cycles.

SSS is a workshop for slorgs– sloped organisms. For millennia, human organisms have been collaborating with, traversing, inhabiting, perceiving, and relating to sloped terrain. Within the steep escarpments of the Great Rift Valley, a unique bioregional climate, landscape, and ecology fostered the evolution of our ancestors into upright hominids.  The original stewards of this land, the Massachuseuk people, derived their name after the sacred hill Massa-adchu-es-et, massa meaning "large," adchu meaning "hill," et an identifier of place, translating roughly as "large hill place" (Jarzombek). The city of Boston was even founded as a colony in search of the “city upon a hill.” The condition of the slope is fundamentally coded within our very existence, the slorg’s physiology and cognition driven by the undulations of the land.

Through learning to slow our attention to the subjective intelligence sensed by the body in space, slorgs are able to tune our pulse to the rhythms of the earth’s cycles, revealing environmental entanglements and response-abilities. We engage in sympoeisis—making with our communities of humans and non-humans (Haraway)—by moving with. SSS will culminate in the creation of a site-specific, collective happening in the legacy of the 1960’s Fluxus artists.

SSS welcomes participants of all backgrounds and abilities with no prior familiarity with dance to experiment freely, embedding their own daily patterns within local ecology. As we transition between seasons and semesters, SSS is a method for grounding and acknowledging our position with this moment.

COMMENTS/QUESTIONS

1:00-3:00 Field Trips and score drawing (weather permitting)
3:00-4:00 Break/Rest/Commute
4:00-6:00 Movement in dance studio, guest speakers

Participants can 
Bring: a sketchbook and pens
Wear: loose, comfortable, breathable clothing for studio sessions and warm weather-resistant layers for field trips.

Lina Bondarenko is a current graduate student in SMArchS Urbanism at MIT Architecture, following a career practicing architecture and urbanism, teaching design at an arts high school, and a lifetime dancing and performing with various dance troupes. SSS follows her research on urban infrastructure of sloped terrain as spaces of subjugation and solidarity, presented as public happenings at architecture conferences in San Francisco titled “Steep Urbanist.”

Advance sign-up required

It’s that day you’ve been waiting for—you’re at home, there it is, that dish you’ve been longing for, there, set up on the kitchen table. It’s the one you rarely get to enjoy but always look forward to, and as you savor it, your mind starts to wonder… whose recipe is it? How did this become your favorite meal? You start to think about the memories attached to it—how much does this meal remind you of a day in the past… or even where are most of these ingredients from, and how hard are they to find? In this two-week virtual workshop, we invite you to plan a meal for loved ones while exploring the connection between food, culture, and place. Through Mapping Recipes, you’ll delve into the kitchen table—a space where stories are passed down and identities are shared—and how it may become a site for reclaiming ancestral memory and collective identity. By the end of this class, students will use mapping as a tool to support a theoretical framework, exploring representational methods such as collage, sketches, cartography, graphs, and GIS data. Through the lens of a specific recipe, mapping will go beyond literal boundaries to represent the complexities of the USA | Mexico border. The ingredients, origins, personal stories, and cultural significance of the recipe will be mapped, followed by the presentation of an architectural narrative centered around the setting of the kitchen table. We hope you join us as we question and challenge the boundaries of culture, memory, and place, reimagining the kitchen table as a site for deeper connection and understanding.