Explores initial thesis ideas and bases for choosing among multiple interests. Assessment of design research strengths and weaknesses. Overview of conceptual frameworks and research methods. Preparation for summer field research and proposal development.

Preparatory research development leading to a well-conceived proposition for the MArch design thesis. Students formulate a cohesive thesis argument and critical project using supportive research and case studies through a variety of representational media, critical traditions, and architectural/artistic conventions. Group study in seminar and studio format, with periodic reviews supplemented by conference with faculty and a designated committee member for each individual thesis.

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in architecture design. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise. 

AI technology is being developed, deployed, and used in a growing number of domains to perform complex tasks such as driving cars and speech recognition; actions that could only have been performed in the past by humans. A recent study by McKinsey Global Institute estimates that about 70% of companies will have adopted at least one type of AI technology by 2030, and that 60% of current occupations can be automated in the next 10 years. Therefore, AI could potentially become the most disruptive technology in human history and will have profound impacts on every aspect of our lives, especially on the technology design and labor market. 

Recognizing the critical role that AI will play in defining the future not only of technology, but also geopolitical interactions, many countries now regard AI as a national priority. The United States launched the American Artificial Intelligence Initiative in 2019 with the mission to promote its leadership in AI research, development, and application. One of the eight national strategies identified in this initiative is to “provide education and training opportunities to prepare the American workforce for the new era of AI”.  

X Machine is a mini accelerator workshop course designed to unite computer science and design/architecture together to create innovative and impactful technological solutions to problems in the built and human environment. This half semester course promotes the development of strategic thinking and technical exploration in the realm of AI, with a focus on problem framing and early-stage ideation. The course will provide students with an opportunity to extend a foundational knowledge of AI within an interdisciplinary context. Working in small teams, students will incorporate design thinking approaches that put the user at the center of the creative process as they develop AI-empowered technological solutions. Teams will work on the ideation and conceptualization of either a product, process, or service-based solution that solves real world problems. Students will learn how to design and create a prototype, learn how to maximize their engage with their users/customers, and learn how to determine the value proposition that will make the startup successful.

By the end of this class, student will be able to develop a conceptual business plan for an AI-based technology solution and apply for other programs at MIT such as Sandbox, DesignX, The Engine, etc. 
 

Biodiversity is declining worldwide, driven foremost by the intensification in land management and the transformation of natural areas for agriculture, production forestry, and settlements. Urban areas have doubled since 1992 and, in comparison with 2020, are projected to expand between 30% and 180% until 2100, depending on the scenario applied. Notably, most of the urban growth is often located in regions of high biodiversity and affects ecosystems far beyond urban areas, through resource demands, pollution, and climate impacts. Therefore, biodiversity conservation in urban areas needs to be shaped in a way that supports global conservation efforts. This course introduces the relationships between urban environments and biodiversity, how urban biodiversity influences ecosystem functions and underlying services that affect human well-being and whether urban habitats are hotspots or ecological traps (or neither) for biodiversity. The course will focus on six key topics: Socioeconomic and social ecological drivers of urban biodiversity, urban biodiversity response to technological change, relationships with ecosystem services, urban areas as refugia, spatiotemporal scale in urban biodiversity assessment, and ecological networks. The course will answer several questions such as: which synergies and trade-offs among biodiversity and ecosystem services exist in urban areas, which factors drive the relationships between socioeconomic, and environmental drivers with biodiversity at different spatial scale, and how do urbanization-induced changes in ecological network complexity and diversity affect ecosystem functions.

As there are gaps in our understanding critical to improving biodiversity conservation policies and management in urban areas that need to be filled to improve global biodiversity outcomes. Students will work on developing strategies for improving and managing biodiversity in three cities in Colombia.

Working on three cities in Colombia, students will various data types to first assess the performance of existing biodiversity policies, design methodology for biodiversity management in urban areas using novel approaches such as aerial technology and artificial intelligence, and develop a research framework to accommodate biodiversity conservation with urban areas and highlight ways forward at the science-policy interface. Throughout the class, students will gain skills to understand how to improve urban habitat mapping; (2) integrate multiple urban gradients in the biodiversity assessment framework; (3) using satellite data and AI based methods to improve our mechanistic understanding of the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services; and (4) approaches to extend the involvement of citizens in biodiversity management in urban areas.  The course is meant to provide a solid framework, broad overview, and a rich set of references for future pursuits involving urban biodiversity.

This course is assumed that enrolled students are interested in learning about and discussing the topic of urban biodiversity. Although the course will generally cover the topic of urban biodiversity and urban ecology, it will be flexible enough to allow for individual student outreach into topics of specific interest with regard to urban, big data, AI applications in urbanizing areas.

A workshop that explores the identity of Western/Modern Architecture through four lenses (Objects, Modes, Positioning, and Agency) from a cultural studies perspective. In each section, we will analyze the ways that the field of architecture mediates and constructs spatial forms and spatial knowledge.

In Objects and Modes, a range of material tropes may be explored from machine aesthetics, structural rationalism, vaporization (transparency, whiteness), object v. space, model v. analogue, abstraction v. ornamentation, etc.  In Positioning and Agency, polemics by which the discipline is identified may be explored including autonomy, agency, socio-spatial subjectivities, public v. private hierarchies, duration v. temporality, etc. 

The course will be structured by group discussions of assigned readings and precedents that will inform several experiments in form that explore threshold conditions defined by each student. All experiments will be modeled and represented orthographically. Each student will select one experiment to be fabricated (at a scale to be determined). The goal is to parallel the analysis of texts with an analysis through making.

How can we expand the capacity for architecture as a discipline to address heterogeneous visions and desires? The spaces we inhabit are social constructions that begin in the mind before they are materialized as objects and spaces. This course explores connections between thought and forms in a non-linear manner along two adjacent and conversant paths. Each theme introduced is considered through the lens of the standard cannon of Western/Modern Architecture: Architecture + “X”. The primacy of Western/Modern thought and forms has been predicated on an (often) absent “other.” In a turn toward a heterogeneous understanding of the discipline, the themes are also considered through the lens of power relations and hierarchies ( i.e. what the cannon leaves out: Architecture + “X” + subordination).

Readings and discussions are intended to guide discussions and production that asks “What is below the surface of forms (objects, buildings, spaces)? Readings encourage looking beneath the formal language of objects, buildings, and spaces, to ask “By what social relations and confluence of ideas did this come to be?” Assignments encourage looking at the formal language of objects, buildings, and spaces, to encourage individual formal explorations of the themes and issues uncovered in the texts. The workshop is intended to encourage productive discussions between the two modalities on the creation of ideas and forms historically and in the moment.

This course continues the Imprint publication workshops begun in 2020, which led to the student-designed and produced Imprint 01 & 02 last year. This class will help conceive the Imprint 03 publication, and a student team will be hired from its members to produce the publication in Summer 2022. This spring's class will function in a workshop format with three primary goals: 1.) To help students engage and acquire skills needed to conceive and produce a complex graphic design project like Imprint; 2.) To help students ask, and answer fundamental questions guiding this year's publication’s strategy: What can a book be? Who decides? And how does one curate a selection of essays in an edited volume or journal?; 3.) To catalyze exploration, and engagement with the intricate connections between text and image authorship in publications across design history. The class will be an opportunity (for all students in each graduate degree area in the Department of Architecture) to reflect on previous Imprint issues, revise the project’s structure and future goals, and as a way for new students to get involved in bringing the Imprint 03 project forward in summer 2022.

Master/Piece workshop will study 3 buildings that are considered seminal in contemporary architecture, built by architects that remain active in practice. We will discuss why those works are key and the chain of reactions and trends that detonate in architecture culture, their traces and impact in peers and in other projects. We will focus deep in the conceptual to constructive scales and the masters will join the class to culminate the analysis and conversation.

This part-seminar, part-workshop looks to identifying changing patterns of creativity across the arts under influence of new technical apparati (phono, photo, filmic…) looking to trace the emergence of rule-based generative processes and their accelerating proclivity via current computational media. While there is evidence of parametric praxis as far back as the Roman engineer, Vitruvius, and iterative geometric processes implicit in historic Islamic and Oriental art forms, it is in the late 19th century and early 20th century that vivid new modes of auto-poietic praxis take hold, as if aspiring to a far greater degree of machinic salience. The resulting artworks - literary, sonic, kinetic, plastic - quite radical in their disjunctive form, were often scorned as bizarre in their novelty and aspiration. Yet their influence, looking to exceed intuition and direct creative aptitude in favor of symbiotic (human-machine) drives, was formative for modes of avant-garde production early C20th, and extends to ever-more normative generative practices late C20th and early C21st. As computation then absorbs all such prior disruptive apparati, imbuing them with powerful generative potency, so such lineage seems destined to become established, even dominant, in mainstream patterns of production and reception. We will look at a variety of cultural fields, but architecture will be the prime focus here, since despite being held to be slow to adapt to technical change, one finds pioneering works that offer plastic counterpoint to more agile literary or kinetic art forms...

This seminar component encourages looking backwards to vivid pioneers of auto-poiesis (in areas of your choosing), intending that you recognize that such creative method is vital to the final artwork (how working in a new manner leads to a new art-form). But pivoting to the workshop component, this prompts a looking forwards in you attempting precisely-indeterminate formative-isms, deploying such insights into creative experimentation via a now-digital imagination (whether using a computer or not). The lineage of experimental creativity intends to offer framing to new aptitude and imagination, and to theorize changing artistic motivations under influence of emerging technologies, as a means to release auto-poietic aptitude in your own work. At root is the idea that creativity or design is not static, but shifts through history under influence of the various technical systems that society adopts, none more powerful than the  current shift to digital media. This invites profound changes in cultural production and reception, aided by gaining insight into prior autopoietic habitudes as a key to emerging creative drives: it requires technical acuity and aesthetic openness.

Note:  For spring 2022 BSAD and Design minor students can take 4.s00 as a restricted elective in place of 4.043. Consult your advisor for details. Design Intelligence is a new subject that introduces students to a practical, hands-on approach to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Providing a new lens through which to engage machine learning through aesthetic, form-finding and behavior, the course introduces students to topics such as k-nearest neighbors, regression and classification, neural networks, and generative adversarial networks, as well as how to collect and prepare data for training their own models. Situated within a graphic, product and interaction design context, students will learn to develop a new kind of creative practice that not only actively engages in shaping the future of artificial intelligence, but is also instrumental in addressing its biases and failures in creating a more equitable and just society.