🌃 Troubled Worlds Curriculum Design

🤔 Problem Space

During my time in graduate school, I participated in a multi-quarter research project focused on design for the Anthropocene.

The research project was structured as a reading group. In the first half of the project, we would read an excerpt from a large text or a handful of papers on a theme, and then come together and talk through our takeaways.

🛠 Process

Initially, I was curious about two overarching questions: is data, as an encoded artifact, materialized ideology; and has anyone ever calculated the energy consumption of performing basic office tasks?

When the research project was running, it was my duty to introduce these ideas to other folks by leading a discussion section focused on these topics.

🎉 Outcomes

The outcome of the project was an undergraduate curriculum focused on some of the different emergent themes of the group--situated design, adaptation to the environment, energy consumption, supply chains, and repair.

I concluded my participation in the group by writing a module on power consumption for the syllabus we produced. You can view our published curriculum here.