Time: Thursday, 08:55AM – 02:15PM
Place: BARN 402

Example Curriculum:
Current classes working on HSIM Madrid:[how architecture is made] London: New York:

Course Structure:
HowStuffisMade is a 6 – 8 week course introducing college level engineering and design students to the social and political constraints, organizational innovations and global context that inform manufacturing decisions. This course complements introductory engineering and design curricula by providing a dynamic, flexible platform for case-study based content and student-led industry investigations not otherwise included in current engineering and design programs. HSIM modules are applied to / taught within existing semester long classes. Class time is divided between weekly studios and lectures/seminars covering assigned reading (manufacturing site-visits are conducted outside of scheduled class-time).

In Spring 2006, HowStuffisMade will begin distributing a course module to university programs in the San Diego region. National distribution will begin in the Fall of 2006. During the project’s first 5 years HSIM staff will conduct site visits and professional development seminars with selected faculty and administrators from city, state and private institutions. Following this period exemplary faculty will be designated as local area representatives for continuing program distribution and professional development subject to oversight and assessment by HSIM staff members.

Core Content Areas:
HSIM is producing course content in the form of two parallel readers (one for faculty and one for students) addressing core topics. As a nationally and internationally distributed program, HSIM is designed to accommodate core content areas and additional areas of faculty expertise, student interest and geographic relevance: each course will develop as a record of student and faculty investigations and local industry resources. Following review and assessment, materials assembled and produced for each course (additional readings, topics, industry contacts and information) will be publicly compiled and organized on the HSIM on-line site and made available for use by future HSIM faculty and students.
HSIM courses address contextual information via lectures, seminars and readings and guide student-led manufacturing investigations via standards of evidence and faculty/industry feedback. Core areas, addressed in seminars, lectures and readings will include the following:
1. Introduction to Industrial Engineering
2. Introduction to International Labor Economics and Policy
3. Path Dependent vs. Discontinuous models of Design Innovation
4. Introduction to Industrial Ecology
5. Commons-based & open-source information production
6. The Politics of Information
HSIM is currently creating a series of lectures/seminars and bibliographies for each of these areas.

Procedures:
Students begin by selecting a product and dissecting it to determine its component parts. Industry contact, site visits and documentation proceed through the 6-8 period during weekly studio crits. To ‘hand-in’ or publicly publish the encyclopedia entry students email the designer and manufacturers identified (ccing faculty) inviting them to improve the entry and instructing them on how to enter corrections/updates. All students have the option to remain on an auto-alert list that notifies them of any edits made to their entries. The decision to adopt edits remains at the discretion of the students and advising project faculty edits are accepted only after meeting standards of evidence and verification.

Assessments & Evaluations:
Student assessments, based on the quality of their entries, are conducted by faculty. General program assessments will be conducted by HSIM staff. Site and user interface functionality reviews will assess data including results from student, faculty and industry interviews, site traffic rates and content editing frequency.

Related events:
Design Heroix Grand Rounds monthly lecture series

Focus the Nation teach-in

Originally given at San Jose City Hall, Council Chambers, as part of FUSE the presentation was streamed live to Ars Virtua in Second Life [ http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seventh%20Eye/6/77/48] and is available as a podcast. The talk was entitled “The Environmental Health Clinic: on structuring participation in the environmental movement, or more specifically, in re-imagining, refiguring and rebuilding our relationships to natural systems”—intro below. However the presentation in 2nd life, its second life, underscores the questions about participation–what actions are available to your avatar? does it matter who you are? or that you are an avatar in the material and bodily questions involved in environmental health?

Intro:

Does anyone know what to do about global warming? I am guessing that everyone has a few ideas, no? But how does anyone one of us go about developing these ideas, trying them out, testing, developing, and learning more? And how many people are interested in doing something about climate change and other environmental issues? I don’t know anyone who is not. But somehow the bombastic “what you can do” guides in every green issue of a magazine do not foster a social movement; signing petitions, writing letters to political representatives doesn’t make me feel like I have made a vital contribution; using less gas, less paper, less energy doesn’t make me feel more effective, doesn’t draw on my specific situation/expertise/constraints—it all makes me feel impatient. But I get most impatient with the certainty (and morally superior tone) with which I am ordered to change to compact fluorescents, ride a bike, recycle, use bamboo flooring (substitute in 100 other ineffectual and symbolic actions). Haven’t looked into recycling the compact fluorescents and the neurotoxicant effects of the mercury released from this product; haven’t had their students arrested for participation in a bike ride; nor been hit by car; or colleagues arrested and prosecuted as “terrorists” for environmental activism; haven’t they tried to use the recycled glass, or plastics and delved into the strange and complex waste industry; haven’t they measured the formaldehyde and other emissions of the green materials….the point is there is not much certainty in complex socio-ecological systems,ally persuasive?

Phil Brown described three conditions involved in the organization of a Social Movement around Environmental Health .

Community observations are legitimate.

Riverkeeper Mobil Oil Spill;

noticed oil

–

causal issues …

The travels of Spinach

The xClinic prescribes this and other CUP workshops for structuring community engagement in the complex processes involved in development.

Summary:
What to do in the face of a climate crisis? How does the social movement around environmental change coalesce? How do cultural ideas interact with technical, material and economic constraints to develop the movement around new environmentalism? How does the contemporary environmental movement differ from its predecessors? How can we reimagine our relationship to natural systems?

Topics:
Environmental Art Activism, Social Networking, Innovative and Inclusive Design

Projects:
1) Me++: Become an Environmental ImPatient
2) Where++:
3) Them++: HowStuffisMade
4) How++: Environmental Health Clinic: Brown sites
5) When++:

Selected texts:

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin Co, 2007)Link to The Death of Environmentalism

Response by Carl Pope from the Sierra Club, Laura Fauth from AdBusters, and the Climate Progress Blog.

Kate Stohr, Cameron Sinclair, Design Like you Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humantarian Crisis (Metropolis Books, 2006)

Alex Stephen, World Changing (website)

Simon M. Reader and Kevin N. Laland, Animal Innovation (2003).

Phil Brown, Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement (Columbia Uninversity Press, 2007)

John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (MIT Press, 2006).

Charles Perrow, The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerablity to Natural, Industrial and Terrorist Disasters (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Related events:
Design Heroix Grand Rounds monthly lecture series

Focus the Nation teach-in

Marissa Jahn, artist and curator, speaks about social space of seeds, anti-advertising, and the I-5 project.
POND
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/01 Pond 1.mp3

Agricultural practices
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/02 Egyptian Representation 1.mp3

Plant properties
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/03 Clover properties.mp3

Throw n’ Sow
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/04Throw n sow.mp3

One Tree
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/06one tree.mp3

Victory Gardens
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/07Victory Gardens.mp3

Exhibition: “Shop Dropping”
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/08Shop Dropping.mp3

Invisible-5
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/09Invisible 5.mp3

Q&A: expertise and artist’s role
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/091q n a_ expertise and artists.mp3

Q&A: public engagement and money
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/092q n a_ public engagement.mp3

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/05bubble_space.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/08bubble_literacy.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/10bubble_flow.pdf

Corrado Poli’s “Traffic Revolution” aims at undermining some entrenched biases regarding professional and economic monopolies in urban mobility planning.

The first part of the essay critically analyzes decision-making and planning related to urban traffic policies. In the second part, some methods and tools are presented. They intend to remove biases and then lead to problem-creating “solutions”.

“Traffic Revolution” challenges the old-established idea that links transport with communication. Traffic planning in urban areas should begin with the analysis of citizens’ behavior and preferences instead of just focusing on road or rail construction. A series of new projects are presented which include mobility demand reduction and focus on social planning.

REVIEW

“If one’s only tool is a hammer, then all problems look like nails”. This aphorism by Mark Twain synthesizes the content of Corrado Poli’s new essay. All over the world, urban traffic policies and the building of traffic-related infrastructures, have failed either to satisfy the mobility demand or to cope with high environmental impacts. Nonetheless, decision-makers have never really questioned the traditional approach. Moreover, in order to find a solution, they keep asking the same professionals who have been failing for at least forty years and are thus responsible for the current unsustainable situation.

“TRAFFIC REVOLUTION. Less Mobility, More Communication” also includes a long subtitle that better explains its content. It goes: “The political problem of traffic plans from transport engineering to communication development. Techniques, problems and environmentalist solutions”. Poli’s approach is far-reaching. The author proposes a drastic change in the usual method of how urban mobility problems are coped with. He applies humanities approach and social sciences tools to understand and solve it. The first assumption is that the usual transport engineering techniques are the very cause of the problems we want to disentangle.

The essay is skillfully written and is easy to read. Poli is actually a journalist and a writer besides being Professor of Economics and Environmental Ethics at the University of Bergamo, Italy, and a consultant to many local and central governments on urban and traffic planning. The arguments are always consistent, giving detailed information and are based on sound research combined with a long lasting direct experience. Nonetheless, the tone often swings to irony and complicity with the reader. Corrado Poli makes it easy reading by including examples, anecdotes and quotations at the beginning of each chapter. Among these quotations, the first one – by Marguerite Yourcenar –presents the real sense of the essay: “As usual there were plenty of practical reasons to justify the absurd and drive to the impossible”. It can translate into the question: “How many useless infrastructures – highways, tunnels, bridges, underground rails, etc. – have been built claiming inexistent ‘practical’ reasons?”

“Traffic Revolution” implies infringing some professional and economic monopolies. In public administration, civil engineers, who associate with construction companies, have dominated the traffic policy debate and management. The essay challenges the old-established idea that equals communication and transport. On the contrary, the starting point of mobility plans should be the analysis of citizens’ behaviors and preferences. One of the priorities should be the containment of the constructions’ role in coping with mobility demand problems. Corrado Poli claims that also the mass/public transportation infrastructures should be included in the containment process. On this ground a series of projects for reducing mobility demand are proposed which are based on democratic social planning methods. Although the book is not a handbook, in the second part of it the author proposes explicit planning methods and applicable tools. Both the first and the second part of Corrado Poli’s “Traffic Revolution” are convincing. However, the first more theoretical part is definitely more original and insightful than the second, at least for the American public.

The book is to be read together with the companion essay (forthcoming) on European middle-size cities. These cities – which prove to have the highest quality of living standard in the world – are the model to imitate for a new urban organization. However, they undergo the organizational and cultural power of the big cities. Metropolises colonize middle size cities by imposing a technology unsuitable to a smaller scale as it was devised for (not) solving large urban areas problems.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Corrado Poli is Professor of Economics and Environmental Ethics at the University of Bergamo, Italy. He also heads the Environmental Communication Laboratory at the same University. Beginning January 2007 he will be Senior International Urban Fellow at The Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies, Baltimore. Dr. Poli has chaired and managed public Bodies and serves on journals boards. He has taught at several Italian and foreign universities such as The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimora (USA) and Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane (Australia). Dr. Poli consults on urban policy and environmental issues and is an editorialist for newspapers and TV networks.

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/ArtActGradeScheme.pdf

Attached is the special double issue published in TIME magazine, April 9, 2007
“The Global Warming Survival Guide: 51 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference”
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/TIME001.pdf

Please post your comments based on a critical assessment of this journalistic piece.