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

Congo: The War the World Ignores
by Johann Hari, UK Independent

http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3245293

War-Devastated Congo, Your Remote Control, Playstation and Cell Phone.
AUDIO – Amy Goodman interviewing Johann Hari

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/07/1436229

Lana Bernberg, a commercial and documentary television cinematographer, photographer and director before her graduate degree in Environmental Education, and joining the HowStuffisMade project, provides an introduction to storyboarding and how to plan shots to capture critical aspects of production, manufacturing and the art of documentation.
How do you depict industrial contaminants that might be health and safety risks?
How do you “see” the weight of the materials someone lifts? What is the quality of the social relationships at work? How do you depict the materials that come from 6 different countries? Much of the story of production is hard to see, yet important to translate into visual form.

Her lecture notes can be found on the WritingintheInformationAge Wiki in the curricula resources:

http://nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/junglestream/bananasphotoboard.pdf

http://nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/junglestream/storyboardingnotes.doc

http://nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/junglestream/Composition0001.pdf

Francisco van Jole article: http://nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/junglestream/Scriptless%20Society0001.pdf

“This website is put together by students from St Cloud State University in a “Sociology and Politics of Food” class. Students in the course examined how the production, distribution, preparation, consumption, and/or representation of a particular food or consumed item creates reinforces, or challenges structures of power among specific groups of people. The goal of the class was to make the information gathered both available and useful to those outside of the class. This web site is the result, serving as a “clearinghouse” of information on the politics of food. The purpose of this site is to provide information about a variety of ordinary items we consume and the actions that we can all take regarding the politics of food in our everyday lives.”

It’s refreshing that the course is designed to produce good public information. The students’ PDFs are great introductions, emphasizing ‘things you should know’ and ‘things you can do.’ This structure, however, makes it diffulcult to get a sense of how a particular commodity chain operates from start to finish. Similarly, while labor issues an environmental costs are addressed, they’re not cleary organized. Once we complete our website redesign, we’d like to approach Dr. Ore and assess her interest in a possible HSIM / St. Cloud State collaboration.

The Politics of Food, Class Website
Syllabus

“Feral Trade is an initiative to develop new trade relations along social networks. The use of the word ‘feral’ denotes a process which is wilfully wild (as in pigeon) as opposed to romantically or nature-wild (wolf). The passage of goods can open up wormholes between diverse social settings, routes along which other information, techniques or individuals can potentially travel.

The first registered feral trade was initiated in 2003, with the import of 30kg of coffee from Sociedad Cooperative de Cafecultores Nonualcos R.L. in San Pedro Nonualco El Salvador, to the Cube Microplex cinema co-op in Bristol UK. The coffee is now traded on through the UK and Europe over social, cultural, familial and occupational networks.

Design and production of documentary product packaging is an integral part of the feral trade process, with a view to rendering diverse currents in global shipping, international relations & network mobility from the extreme local point of view of the feral trade product.”

Feral Trade

This is good news for Wikipedia which currently contains over 2.5 million articles and is the 37th most visited website on the internet. It’s also good news for HowStuffisMade, which is wiki-based (though still responsible to standards of evidence overseen by academics), and for B.I.T.’s continuing work on ‘distributed lay interpretation,’ a central thesis of the OOZ project.

Nature Special Report
Wikipedia

Sound too good to be true? Some consider that to be the case. NatureWorks is a subsidiary of Cargill, a mutilnational agribusiness that has effectively cornered the market on genetically modified corn. Cargill’s claims that cost-effective corn-based PLA production prohibits it from sorting ge from non-ge corn has been heavily criticized by several environmental organizations. In 2001 Patagonia terminated a developing partnership with NatureWorks (to replace some of its petroleum-based apparel products with NatureWorks’ PLA-based Ingeo fibers) on the grounds that the unknown ecological risks of ge corn outweighed PLA’s environmental benefits. For its part, NatureWorks claims that it will explore PLA production from other non-ge plant sources, but for now, genetically modified corn seems to be their carbon source of choice. It’s a first step.

NatureWorks
Ingeo
CorpWatch Article
More on Biodegradable Thermoplastics: What Makes Green Plastics Green?

Dara O’Rourke, assistant professor of Environmental and Labor Policy at Berkeley, has proposed applying this technology to product traceability – in theory, empowering consumers to make choices on the basis of back-end production information (i.e. how something was made) that could provide a competetive advantage to best-practice manufacturers. So, the next time you’re at the supermarket wondering what ‘free-range’ really means, you might be able to see for yourself.

Semacode

NYT College Point Virtual Tour

Most of Burtynsky’s work in China continues in this vein, but his manufacturing series is arresting – for once, his formal interests in scale intersect with the organization of human labor. While statistics on the growth of China’s manufacturing sector are by now well rehearsed, Burtynsky’s photographs attest both to the immediacy of visual information, and more importantly, to the social restructuring effecting this growth.

Edward Burtynsky