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.

Clients, funding, consultants, contracts–architects are enmeshed in financial mechanisms that forever remind us of our direct reliance on local and global economies. Money talks and architecture follows: our work articulating the interests of those served while fluctuating with the rapidity of the market. And while this relationship may be fixed, perhaps we can find ways to resist its normative logics, which exacerbate social inequalities and consolidate power in the hands of the few and the privileged. This workshop will explore alternative economies and financial arrangements through the the lens of queer practice, with its history of instrumentalizing the language of power against itself, to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes.

We will ask whether in addition to designing architecture, we can also design the market that demands architecture–to produce economic scenarios under which we might build. Each week we will pair readings in economic anthropology (studying how economies are shaped by behavior, cultural values, and social relationships) and queer theory (identifying strategies of planned failure, makeshift assembly, and re-orientation) to invent atypical demand-chains, work against models of optimal performance, and instrumentalize culture to undercut efficiency. We will look at how we might produce clients, programs, and actor networks rather than responding to the whims of the market. We will consider how we might think of economic arrangements as tools for designers.

We will read, write, and compile a compendium of case studies for a publication on the topic. Students are encouraged to find broad reaching examples–from the domestication of post-war military technology to the proliferation of sharing economies to recent trends in reuse and the circulation of materials. We will focus on buildings, materials, and products, largely drawn from North America in the 20th and 21st centuries, but may also look further afield. And while queerness provides a shared framework for the workshop, students are encouraged to consider analogous lenses through which we might rewrite the relationship between practice and service. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

*A workshop not just for queer students, but for students curious to work with queer intention.