This course is aimed for architecture and urban planning students. It will introduce the synthesis of data-driven research and urban / architectural design. The workshop will walk participants through their own data collections using gaze tracking glasses and heart rate monitors on campus.

Contact Isabel Waitz to sign up by January 1, 2026.

We all feel it - fear of the climate crisis is pervasive, and it’s hard to imagine the future without fatalism and dread. Worldwide, surveys show that a majority of people believe ‘the future is frightening’ and that ‘humanity is doomed.’ 

Yet, despite the dangers we face today, the world isn’t actually any scarier than it has been in the past. It’s our present outlook on the future, devoid of direction, possibility, and hope, which is far more terrifying. It doesn’t have to be this way. Past social movements have shown that humans are capable of radically steering the direction of the future through collective action.

Waking up to our destiny is a deliberate practice - a collective effort of forward-thinking to escape the sense of doom that pervades our generation. In the wave of cynicism that surrounds us, imagining a hopeful climate future isn’t naive - it’s radical.

This workshop invites participants to engage in a radical imagining of a climate-positive future, beginning at the scale of their own personal community. Through design exercises, games, and interactions with guest speakers, participants will find ways to inhabit these future ecologies today - to move from “What If?” to “What’s Next?” 

The final outcome of this workshop will be an exhibition celebrating our collective time travel into a hopeful climate future, which will be expressed through a series of “dress rehearsals:” speculative glimpses into optimistic new worlds and how we can practice inhabiting them today. The results of this collective worldmaking will be exhibited in the Wiesner Gallery at the end of January - details TBD.

Contact Sam Owen by 1/16/26 if interested.

This three-day workshop explores assembly and disassembly as a method for architectural thinking. Participants will engage with a set of modular objects through short theoretical prompts, design exercises, and hands-on construction. Each day introduces a new task emphasizing how bodily interaction, material resistance, and temporary structures shape spatial understanding. The workshop generates documented configurations and reflections that will feed directly back into the development of our architectural critical thinking. Contact Alexandros Gravalos for more information.

What happens when we try to formalize creativity? Can rules, structures, and models actually make design more imaginative? This workshop invites curious minds and interdisciplinary folks to explore how ideas from mathematics, computation, and creative reasoning shape the way we think, draw, and build. Through hands on exercises, we test how formalizations can plug into computational workflows, from parametric design to generative AI, without losing the spontaneity that fuels creative work. It is a conversational, experiment-as-you-go session for anyone interested in how intuition and structure collide, collaborate, or transform. Join us to question assumptions, prototype ideas, and rethink how structure might unlock new modes of design and making.

Advance sign-up required by 1/21/26; contact bailey_f@mit.edu.

This one-week IAP workshop invites a small, dedicated cohort of MIT students to advance the design of a root cellar for Hannan Healthy Foods (HHF) farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Conceived as a community-oriented food preservation resource, the project supports capacity building on the farm while engaging broader questions of equitable food access, agricultural resilience, and sustainable land stewardship. The workshop includes a site visit and direct conversations with the farmer, local community members, and experts in natural building. 

Participants will iterate design concepts, test material and structural strategies, and explore natural building systems specific to the climatic and geological conditions of the Greater Boston region. Hands-on exploration with natural materials will be part of the week; however, given the short timeframe, the primary focus will be on research-driven investigation and small-scale testing rather than full prototyping. Students will also visit potential sourcing sites, including those offering surplus or reclaimed resources. A detailed program of requirements for the root cellar, including size, capacity, food storage types, ventilation needs, and environmental performance criteria, will be a key deliverable. 

Throughout the week, the cohort will play an active role in shaping the workshop’s direction. Together, participants will develop a robust design proposal that advances the performance and spatial intent of the root cellar while strengthening its role as a long-lasting shared asset for the farm and surrounding community. This proposal will lay essential groundwork for continued development leading toward construction in summer 2026. 

Interested students should email Aleks Banas (aleksb@mit.edu) and Zachary Rapaport (zrap@mit.edu) with a short (2-4 sentence) summary of their interests by December 20.

Also open to undergraduates.

This design studio and seminar explores translation as both a prompt and a method for publishing. Through readings, guest lectures, and site visits, students will examine the histories of typographic printing and the technological precedents for fixing forms of language. Students will work with and expand on various “translation” machines, starting with the printing press, to consider what tools can copy, transform, and reproduce texts and images. Students can expect to test these methods, build their own fonts, and learn how to bind their own books. By the end of the term, each student will have developed a printed and bound publication, grounded in a specific translation topic of their choosing.

Skill-building workshops and site visits will be arranged outside of the class time listed, in consultation with the group.

This workshop will be open to both undergraduate and graduate students who have design work that is documented or documentable, from all design-related classes or activities. Collected and documented design work will be utilized in the process of conceptualizing and assembling a design portfolio.

Week one will introduce skills for developing a complex graphic design project while prompting critical questions about how pages function as sites of organization and meaning. Students will examine principles of structure and composition as they begin shaping a framework to support the presentation of their design work. Alongside this, we will consider broader inquiries such as: What can a page be? How do designers construct relationships between text and image?

Week Two extends these inquiries to the scale of the portfolio. Students will explore what a portfolio can be while working on sequencing projects and combining text and image to communicate ideas.
Students have the choice to participate in Week 1, Week 2, or both weeks.

Software: Indesign
Students should bring laptops to all sessions.
Contact:  paulpett@mit.edu or jlobdell@mit.edu

Simply printing drawing from rhino may prompt a journey across three software platforms, two licensing pools, a handful of file formats, a user authentication, a deposit of $1.50, and a toolpath actuation which transcribes the data onto a sheet of paper as six hundred discrete droplets of ink per square inch. 

A large network of operations stretch across this relatively mundane action of labor, greased by the accommodations of our many software infrastructures. While many design softwares are envisaged as open “sandbox” environments, their being a conduit to labor often has users using software as a means to an end, while common use-cases ultimately direct the attention of future developments. The well-worn cartography gets vertically integrated with telescopic functionalities, while vast territories of potential intersection remain unrepresented and illegible. 

This course views the experimental technique and unsuspected intersection as a site for new artistic and political potentials. Rather than reverse engineering a desired outcome to a sequence of software protocols, we are proposing to consider new software protocols first and to discover what they produce. This approach is designed to complicate standard user-profiling while expanding our notions of what software-mediated design can look like. 

In an effort to deprioritize content and prioritize process, we will be centering the class around an archive of flower photographs. The method is as follows: Every participant will choose an image of a flower from the archive. Each image will be subject to a digital transformation of one’s choosing. The network cartography of each technique will be diagrammed. We will meet to see everybody’s flowers and discuss their techniques. The manipulated flower will then be exchanged for another’s, where 2,3, & 4 will be repeated. 

This class will be held as a joint project between the GSD J-Term and MIT IEP, facilitated by Zachary Slonsky (GSD MArch) and Aisha Cheema (MIT MArch). In the first meeting, we will walk through an example of this process being carried out between us two. Each image and diagram pair will be formatted to the page of a recipe book. At the end, these pages will be compiled, printed, and bound. The collective result will form an archive of deviant network practices, experimental techniques, and pretty flowers. Each participant will receive a physical copy. We hope to see you there!

This Site Planning practicum coincides with the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina—a pivotal moment for New Orleans and for MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). Over the past two decades, DUSP faculty, students, and alumni have supported the city’s recovery and resilience efforts through long-term partnerships and planning initiatives.

The studio will re-engage with New Orleans through the lens of corridor-scale resilience, focusing on how underrecognized neighborhood/commercial corridors can adapt to climate and social challenges such as heat, flooding, and energy vulnerability. Students will develop Corridor Resilience Action Plans for three areas, building on the 2016 New Orleans Main Street Resilience Plan, while exploring neighborhood connectivity and how urban design, equity, and identity intersect.