Workshop Flyer

Hello, game designers! Welcome to this two-week long, 5-session board game design workshop. Board game design is an inclusive art method, creating a relatively free and safe space for all ideologies and opinions. We believe in the board game’s power to deliver touched narratives, make unapproachable themes accessible, and build intimacy in social relationships. In this workshop, we will focus on the board game’s overlooked educational and intellectual aspects that could serve as a tool to tackle social and cultural issues in daily life. There’s no prerequisite for the workshop, and we welcome all from the MIT community regardless of background, age, and experience.

During class, we will play, discuss, demonstrate, design, and play-test board games. Through a mixture of learning methods, you will understand how board game design can help raise awareness, propose interventions, and resist existing problems in a playful tone, and gain knowledge that allows you to evaluate and analyze any board games in the future. Most importantly, this workshop will help you start designing and developing your board game prototype. You can bring any topics, themes, or questions you might have been thinking about into this course and explore them within the framework of gameplay design. You are encouraged to work in a group of two for the final deliverables.

By the end of this workshop you will be able to:

1. Utilize the four elements of game design (aesthetic, story, mechanics, and technology) as a tool kit to assess any kind of board game and set goals for your design.
2. Gain familiarity with board game mechanics, and be able to identify fair and balanced gameplay strategies for your board game.
3. Articulate a main theme and a preliminary storyline of your board game and how they support the game in tackling social and cultural issues.
4. Deliver a playable game prototype

- Click here to register

Funded by the Council for the Arts at MIT and the MindHandHeart Innovation Fund

9/6/23 - first meeting of class will be in room 7-336 (previously listed as 3-329)

(pre-approved for MArch Urbanism elective Fall 2023)

Through this class, students will explore the idea of creating a "climate corps" for MIT: a way for students (and potentially alumni) to take action for climate and environmental justice on campus and in Cambridge and greater Boston community, while building skills and experience.

The class will involve robust stakeholder engagement (fellow students and student groups, alumni, faculty, staff, administration, community partners ...) and the delivery of recommendations and scenarios for the creation of an MIT Climate Corps. MITOS will be 
either the client or at the least a close partner to the class.

Undergraduates welcome.

(pre-approved for MArch Urbanism elective Fall 2023)

he last decades have seen the relentless acceleration of planetary-scale environmental and social challenges. Phenomena as widespread urbanization, human-induced climate change, or the operationalization of natural landscapes interrogate both the agency and the limits of architectural practices. The goal of this workshop is to explore how our architectural responses to the local impact of those planetary phenomena can trigger new forms of spatial and political organization — a possibility we will refer to as cosmopolitical design. 

We will study the idea of cosmopolitical design by investigating the relations between seven main areas of action: 1) Geovisualization, geoknowledge and geoimagination; 2) Architecture After Planetary Urbanization; 3)Territorial Design Across Scales; 4)Ecology as Planetary Praxis; 5)Climate Cosmotechnics; 6)Autonomy and Cosmopolitics; and 7)Decolonization and Cosmopolitics. Together, these seven areas aim to situate the local interventions that constitute the core of architectural practice as catalysts of broader processes of spatial and political structuring.  

The workshop is conceived as a collective design-research exercise, combining lectures, discussions and workshop sessions. In the lectures we will see how each of the seven aforementioned topics acted as a trigger of planetary-oriented architectural practices during modernity, and we will start reflecting upon and questioning the resulting modes of spatial production. Our discussions will build upon the lectures and upon a highly plural body of literature including thinkers from across the planet. We will read texts exploring the ideas of critical cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitics, cosmotechnics, pluriversality, world-ecology and decolonization.  

At the beginning of the course, each student will select a topic of design-research, conducing to the final production of a small individual book. Our emphasis will be on the production of strong and consistent visual narratives. Together, we will explore the synergies and convergences between your research topics, and conclude the term gathering the exercises in a collective volume. 

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 to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes. We’ll draw from a range of writing–from queer theory to post-colonial studies to literary criticism–to undo dominant financial orientations.

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), texts from other disciplines, and case-studies 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 research 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. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

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.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the Department.