Design Quest: AgTech

Catalog description

This course joins technical skillsets to agricultural systems within an applied, project-based course. Agriculture offers a vast design space of climate and material, resource diversity, data and energy systems, with productive real-world constraints and opportunities for innovation. Students may work in embedded electronics, energy infrastructure, data analysis, computational methods, material prototyping, and so on, acquiring or deepening skills to develop functional, site-responsive outputs. Projects could include, as examples: agricultural robotic components, digital platforms, closed-loop embedded control systems for navigation or distribution, energy storage and grid research, targeted remineralization of materially graded soil. Design Quest follows a collaborative, studio-style format, supporting iterative development across digital and physical platforms. Here, projects are considered as world-building processes entering a site of biological production, ecological cohabitation, and regenerative potential. Case studies ranging from microbial fermentation chambers to satellite-regulated orchards, from collapsed experiments in ag-tech to emerging logics of vertical containment explore questions of land, food, labor, and automation. This course is cross-listed with 18360. Although students in 18360 will share lectures and most assignments with students in 18608, students in 18608 will engage in more advanced projects with a higher degree of resolution or involvement compared to students in 18360. This course requires instructor permission. Interested students must contact Professor Chang.