Eight Billion Utopias Seminar
During this honors seminar, we investigated various ways of making and critiquing proposals about urban futures. More and more people live in cities, and they are undoubtedly our future, with the UN predicting that the world population will be 8 billion people by 2025. But how do cities work, who are they for, and who gets to decide how they are developed? We researched ideas from many areas of work, such as critical theory, political theory, science & technology, and design research. We read articles, watched videos, had guest lectures, and conducted our own personal research in Cincinnati to develop our own Utopias with critical and also subjective visions of the future. From the class: "How do we read our visions of the future as a statement on contemporary desires, fears, and anxieties?" We also created an "experimental essay" in any medium to make our vision of a future utopia an real experience.
This seminar helped greatly inform my capstone research, which also has a focus on trash, waste, and the future. I learned a lot about approaches to speculative design, especially from bottom-up methods, which is a discipline of design that I am very interested in. This was an opportunity to read and write responses, forming my own opinion on topics I would not normally engage with. I also benefitted greatly from discussing these topics with students from other majors, seeing how my views on design, art, and creativity differed from engineering and business students.
The impact of this class is knowledge and the ability to question and research in new ways that I will carry forward in my personal and professional work. I already have a notebook filled with notes, sketches, and questions surround this topic. There is also huge potential for the approaches learned in this seminar to be applied to social innovation and change, something I am passionate about.
Sample of work: I am currently developing a "Real Utopian project" surrounding the ideas of environmentalism, trash, recycling, reuse, housing, and flooding. Here is some research so far:
This seminar helped greatly inform my capstone research, which also has a focus on trash, waste, and the future. I learned a lot about approaches to speculative design, especially from bottom-up methods, which is a discipline of design that I am very interested in. This was an opportunity to read and write responses, forming my own opinion on topics I would not normally engage with. I also benefitted greatly from discussing these topics with students from other majors, seeing how my views on design, art, and creativity differed from engineering and business students.
The impact of this class is knowledge and the ability to question and research in new ways that I will carry forward in my personal and professional work. I already have a notebook filled with notes, sketches, and questions surround this topic. There is also huge potential for the approaches learned in this seminar to be applied to social innovation and change, something I am passionate about.
Sample of work: I am currently developing a "Real Utopian project" surrounding the ideas of environmentalism, trash, recycling, reuse, housing, and flooding. Here is some research so far: