🌃 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 using a computer?
Ultimately this led me into doing research about the nature of calculating/computing/documenting information using calculated values via the book of the same name, as well as various projects focused on low-resource computing.
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. We met on a weekly basis and we had to lead discussion sessions focused on the research we had done in the previous week.
🎉 Outcomes
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.
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.