This research-intensive class will engage students and postdoctoral researchers in real-world curatorial practice for the 2027 Islamic Arts Biennale. They will work as a collaborative research collective with an international network of over 35 museums and collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Benaki Museum, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, the al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait, the David Collection in Copenhagen, and a range of cultural institutions across Mali, Nigeria, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, and Saudi Arabia. Students will explore innovative ways to present Islamic art from different regions and time periods through three main curatorial goals: telling nuanced stories about Islamic art through objects and their histories, expanding geographies beyond center-periphery models toward polycentric narratives, and creating new display formats using immersive, experiential, and digital methods that go beyond traditional museum practices.

A central collaborative project is creating the MAWSŪʿA: THE INFINITE DICTIONARY to establish a growing vocabulary for Islamic art that honors diverse cultural perspectives and epistemologies. Research areas within this project may include material intelligence in textile, woodcraft, glass, ceramics, and metalworking technologies; knowledge circulation through pilgrimage and trade networks; experimental approaches to manuscripts and devotional objects; multisensory installation strategies; AI applications in museum contexts; integration of contemporary artistic practice with historical collections; and forms of public engagement that bridge historical scholarship with experiential innovation. These explorations will directly inform the curatorial research for the Biennale. Participants' contributions to the MAWSŪʿA project will be featured in the exhibition and on an ongoing global knowledge-building platform.

Also open to undergraduates.

This course is the first of a series of workshops looking into material practices that see architecture as an assemblage of parts to sponsor life’s activities. While this course will focus heavily on diy material cultures, our subjects of study will range from the living structures of Ken Isaacs to the ready to assemble online warehouse kits to the itinerant designs of Sam Chermayeff to community-based barn raising to temporary vendor kiosks and many other parts-based and nomadic architectural references. We will study each of their technical particularities, through the tools and documents that aid these building cultures: manuals, catalogs, inventories and drop down menus, while also interrogating the larger themes they bring to focus: products, collectivity, material circulation, temporality and activity.

In this first edition, the course will specifically focus on architectural assemblages that sponsor cultural production and enjoyment. We will be looking at pop up raves, outdoor movie rigs, festival rental gear, speaker systems and performance infrastructures.

We will be hearing from our friends at QNCC (Queer Nightlife Community Center) in Brooklyn and we will go on a daytrip to visit the Sonic Warehouse at Dartmouth College where we will attend a small digital sound production workshop.

Master/Piece Wordshop is an exploration of 3 pioneering and creative practices that are considered influential in contemporary architecture, and are crucial in shaping the landscape of architectural thinking today. The discussion will revolve around some key works of these practices and the processes and thinking methods that have shaped their projects. We will then study the impact of these chains of thought and focus on constructive ideas that will be discussed with the masters who will join the class to culminate the analysis and conversation.

Throughout the semester, we will explore how cities and their systems can operate as dynamic, adaptive environments - engaging with topics such as mobility, housing, behavioral simulation, dynamic zoning, community engagement, energy, and emerging technologies. Each week, a guest speaker will introduce a key theme, and class time will blend discussion, interactive activities, and hands-on exploration.

Students will develop a weekly two-page personal vision reflecting on how the system explored that week could enable more livable, equitable, and entrepreneurial urban communities. These weekly reflections will build toward a final personal manifesto, articulating a coherent vision for the future of cities.

Please review the course website to familiarize yourself with the course structure and expectations. Additional details and logistics will be shared during the first session.  The syllabus can be found here

The goal of the class is to explore the intersection of textile fabrication, computational design, and design thinking. Students will learn how computational methods can transform knitting from a traditional craft into a precise digital fabrication technique for creating complex tensile structures and geometric components. By using the 3D knitting machine, students will gain practical experience with digital knitting tools and develop an understanding of how computation enables new possibilities for textile-based architecture. No prior knitting experience required—just curiosity about the intersection of materials, code, and form.

Topics to be covered:

• Design to Fabrication Pipelines: Learn how to translate geometric design concepts into machine-executable (knitting) instructions, bridging the gap between digital design and physical production through computer numerically controlled processes.
• Computational Scripts and Algorithms: Develop computational scripts that encode knitting patterns, structural logic, and material behaviours, creating rule-based systems for generating complex forms. Gain an understanding of algorithmic thinking and how to design procedures that generate textile architectures.
• Topology and Geometry: Explore topological principles and geometric relationships that inform knitted structures, understanding how stitch connectivity, surface curvature, and mesh organization shape both form and function.
• Design of Tensile Structures: Explore how knitted textiles can function as architectural elements, understanding the relationship between stitch patterns, material properties, and structural performance.

Introduces critical theories and contemporary practices in the field of urbanism that challenge its paradigms and advance its future. Includes theoretical linkages between ideas about the cultures of urbanization, social and political processes of development, environmental tradeoffs of city making, and the potential of design disciplines to intervene to change the future of built forms. Events and lecture series co-organized by faculty and doctoral students further engage and inform research.

Goal: Understanding the Conceptual Elegance Carbon might offer Architecture

A broad range of carbo/composite specialists that contributed to DOE and ARPA-e CarbonHouse research will offer insight into the properties and usage of Carbon:

Prof Dag Olav Hessen (carbon cycle geo-biologist), Prof Matteo Pasquali (CNT chemist), Dr Nicola Ferralis (carbon material scientist), Dr Dave Gailus (carbon nanotube scientist), Dirk Kramers (America’s Cup composite structural Engineering), Dr Roger Avakian (polymer compounding), Jeff Kent @ Moore Bros, RI (composite fabrication), Stephan Vaast (CNC milling / composite production), Dr Gus Bosse (carbon research chemist), Doron Levin (carbon research chemist), Dr Steve Nolet (wind-turbine production manager).

Part 1  The History and Potential of Carbon 

Part 1 will engage Dag Olav Hessen’s rueful, The Many Lives of Carbon, that explains the carbon cycle through eons of planetary history with a degree of foreboding. But we will diagram the majestic waltz of bio-systems in their temporal balancing of earth-/ocean-/atmospheric-carbon, with architectural sensibility, looking to capture the discordant breakdown of established biorhythms and its ominous portent with a speculative clarity that science seems to have failed to do.  

Part 2: Towards a Carbon Architecture

Part 2 will turn to use of Carbon as a polyfunctional material, already well-established in most other high-performance structural applications such as boats, planes, trains, wind turbine blades, etc via  fiber-based composites. The development of such materials and methods over the past 50 years has occurred hand-in-glove with emerging digital engineering and fabrication capability, with finite element will turn to use of Carbon as a polyfunctional material structural analysis essential to computing load-path in a zillion layered fibers. But it has equally been enabled by remarkable development of all manner of specialist materials such as cores, resins, adhesives, that testify to the polyvalence of Carbon, allowing order-of-magnitude advantage over mineral/metal structures – more akin to wood in its fibrous base-carbon morphology. The ability to orient fibers along non-isotropic stress-lines is more akin to biological systems than mechanical ones, as perhaps are the use of heat and atmospheric pressure to bind multi-material continuities.  

With leading engineers and fabricators based in Bristol, RI – a pioneering center of composite fabrication – we will consider how the widespread adoption of carbon composites might now be brought to bear on buildings, just as le Corbusier, say, brought forward steel and reinforced concrete by considering the boats and planes of the early 20th century (in Vers Une Architecture).  

Having absorbed the material, engineering, fabrication and environmental potentials this remarkable class of materials offers, students will be asked to envisage a small pavilion or a building component that conveys the tectonic (or anti-tectonic!) principles of such a Carbon  Architecture, looking to capture the brilliant formal and aesthetic qualities of a potentially electrothermal-structural new materiality. While this may speculate on emerging morphologies such as carbon nanotube or carbon foam (that hold promise of hydrogen as a corollary clean fuel, say) at issue will be to demonstrate realism in prescribing manufacturing methods with technical acuity. 

Design+ is a first-year undergraduate advising seminar made up of approximately 30 first-year undergraduate students, 4 faculty advisors, and 4 or more undergraduate associate advisors.

The academic program is flexible to account for diverse student interests within the field of design, and students work with advisors to select a mix of academic and experiential opportunities.

Design+ assists incoming first-year students in their exploration of possibilities in design across MIT. 

Design+ includes a dedicated study space, kitchen, lounge, and a variety of maker spaces which offer Design+ students a second campus home for making and braking.

Design+ introduces first year undergraduate students to opportunities 
Design+ around design such as internships, international travel, and 
Design+ UROPs with some of the most exciting design labs at MIT

For registration and other administrative questions contact The Office of the First Year.

Reading and discussion of texts broadly to the field of Design and Computation. Texts will focus on the history, theory, and practice of computation for design and explore questions of how humans and machines sense, represent, understand, think, and make. Discussions will be informed by texts from a variety of fields including architecture, anthropology, computer science, cognitive sciences, and philosophy. The goal is to serve as a space for students to step back from technical investigations and engage with underlying questions about what it means to employ computation in design.

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus

As we transition from the Information Age to the Imagination Age, creative resilience, artistic intelligence, and other uniquely human traits will be vital for navigating highly complex and rapidly changing environments. Art and design are essential partners to science and technology in this context, driving transformational change and innovation that are integrative, inventive, and profoundly human.

This course blends artistic practice with DesignX's innovation framework to introduce students to Transversal Design. This cross-disciplinary approach works across art, science, technology, ecology, and social systems to address complex, interconnected global challenges. Students will learn to view art and design as imaginative, cultural, and ethical forces that shape futures, not just solve problems. Through this lens, students will learn to work with uncertainty, emerging ideas, and speculative scenarios to create responsible, non-extractive projects and interventions.

This course invites participants to re-examine how they define and achieve success in times of rapid social and ecological transformation. Students will envision speculative projects, which may include creating artifacts, developing systemic thinking, and prototyping public communication. Final projects may utilize artistic media such as posters, videos, sound, poems, and/or performances.

This transdisciplinary class is a collaboration between ACT and the Morningside Academy of Design through DesignX. Students will design and present visual representations of the impact area they choose to explore and innovate.

Students from all disciplines and backgrounds and undergraduates are welcome! 

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus