Why did our college choose a focus on urban technology for its newest degree? What might an architect want to know about this rapidly evolving domain? This seminar provides an easy way to understand and debate new directions in urban technology. This is a non-technical discussion course that runs on weekly readings and interpretive posters. The readings emphasize the interconnections of social and technical change. The posters examine individual cases, at street level, past, present, and future. Through these, course participants briefly wear the hat of historian, journalist, and designer. Weekly conversations cultivate the ability to shift frames of reference: what something means to you now might not be what it meant to someone else back then, or in a different cultural context today, or in technology’s inevitably unintended consequences ahead. For all this, the course adopts the theme of “City Reading”: text in the city, social histories of information, media at street level, the longterm rise of urban data, making cities more usable.
Meets
Thu 8:30-11:30am CMYK