This course asks: what if a familiar typological object—a chair, table or other common wooden element of furniture—could be designed to create its own energy sufficient to offset its manufacture, use lifetime and re-cycling. The Big ZERO Workshop brings together speculation, research, design and making at the scale of the human body and household object to explore whether and how it might be possible to design for carbon zero. 

Our present culture of fulfillment, of instant and seemingly effortless acquisition and consumption of products is built upon a not-so-hidden stream of energy expenditures across vast scales of extraction, production, and consumption of designed goods. Motivated by the challenges, the seemingly elusive chimera and mandate to find ways to design and implement furniture at carbon zero, students will study and re-evaluate the forms and aspirations of iconic plywood furniture precedents that were originally designed for mass-manufacture in the modern post war period. We’ll explore needs for typological transformations and energy “edits” to these precedents. Students will identify that which is essential to the design and eliminate many inherited familiar components of a table or chair.  We’ll work with flexible solar materials and kinetic energy scavenging to design and test if/how solar and kinetic energy could become integral to furniture objects that self-power, self-form, and self-compost. 

In this undertaking and work together, we will engage the architectural imagination to advance critical thinking and speculation on what a possible future world of the Big ZERO might hold and what its consequences—technical, cultural, and practices in everyday life-- might imply. To design for carbon zero is not an isolated technical problem of engineering. Nor is it a substitution of one piece of furniture for another. The enterprise will entail a radical rethinking and reconstruction of the architect’s relationship with design, production, and use.  When household objects in a Big ZERO world operate as hybrids of renewable biomass and infrastructure, new forms of partnership and care with their human owners can be explored-- more like living plants than products.

The workshop will include guest talks and hands-on sessions on wood sourcing, drying and design and computation for human scale hydrohygroscopic wood forming, a process that engages the inherent capacity of multilayered wood plies to self-form instead of being manufactured in a traditional high energy factory setting. Wood, solar and energy harvesting materials for this course will be provided.  Budget and COVID permitting, students will travel to Germany to share ideas and techniques of hydroscopic wood design and making.
 

This Fall workshop will work on the design and production of a paneling system for a sound installation designed by faculty and Belluschi Fellow, Deborah Garcia, for exhibition in Spring 2023. The installation centers on the design of an interactive sound system and seating space. This course will focus on the development of shop drawings, material tests, and a production plan for the fabrication of the installation’s paneling system. We will work with material donated by the Ecovative Mycelium Foundry and will work closely with an engineer to develop a cladding system that utilizes a combination of wood and mycelium. Students will work collaboratively with the faculty member as well as an engineer, a software developer, and a robotics fellow to define the project's formal and material details.

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.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the Department.

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.